The lesson here is about the news media itself. News provision has shifted in the last hundred years from a predominantly public service model of information provision to a competitive model of competition for views - thus shifting more towards entertainment.

In the process the trustworthiness of "news value" has diminished. Corporate law makes it a criminal act for a corporation such as a news provider to act in a way which diminishes value for it's shareholders - so in a fight between traditional news value and profit, the latter will win. This battle between truth and corporate obligation is best illustrated by the Florida court ruling of 2003 that the media can legally lie and falsify news in order to protect it's own interests. (More info at http://www.foxbghsuit.com/ )

When market forces dictate the news value it will naturally tend towards entertainment value rather than informative reporting. The way this effects balance in reporting on issues of public importance is a complex matter for discussion elsewhere. The way it over-values and skews reporting on gonzo gold such as the Kimberly Jernigan story is what I'm getting at.

Let's imagine (extremely conservatively) that one in ten thousand folk in any population, are fruitcakes and potentially dangerously unhinged. (Talking to any local police officer about their callouts would probably give us a much higher figure.) I probably pass a couple on the tram on the way into town. Second life has probably seen about 500 of them through the doors in it's short history. Right now there's maybe 1000 potentially dangerous fruitcakes leveling up in WoW. Sooner or later something is going to happen.

When small towns can have their own dead bodies in barrels and mall massacre stories it's unsurprising (in fact expected) that an MMO would have it's share of stalkings and kidnappings. It's a numbers game, and the larger the number of people the more likely it becomes.

Almost every week someone wins the lottery, even though the chances of winning it are vanishingly remote. That's not front page news because it is expected - yet our news providers arbitrarily decide that a quirky domestic violence issue has news value above all other cases due to some tenuous link to a virtual world. The key news indicator here is a marginal culture. If the protagonists belonged to a small funny little religious sect it would probably have the same attractiveness as a story. If however, like the vast majority of cases of domestic violence, the perpetrators were entirely unremarkable average folk, we'd never hear about it.

The canonical example of news value is stated thus; dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news. One of the key indicators of news value is novelty. The inclusion of second life in this story tells us that it is still considered as a novelty for the general population, or the newsmakers themselves. That they need to rely on such a tenuous link in order to interest the public implies to me that they're scraping the barrel.

Surely there must be more interesting and relevant things for them to report on.