From @pethās comment on Discord, I understood that the conclusions form the MetaNews discussions havenāt been properly communicated. Hence, I am writing this brick-of-a-text to clear things up.
Were people expecting a last weekās news? Should the video content of MetaNews be weekly or bi-weekly? And if the frequency is that small, what is it going to cover? Thinking about these things is what led us to a discussion about the format, the scope and the content of MetaNews.
The expansion of the scope is not to overpromise on new stuff on top of what is already there but is directly relevant to solving issues that came up. The āexpansion of scopeā is basicaly about designing a more standard and better quality template for future episodes that is relevant both inside and outside MG.
Simply put, MetaNews rests on the premise that there is noteworthy News out there to be presented. But then the issue is: what news are to be presented and how? The moment I saw @Gnomeskiās newsletter I could have immediately started filming another episode like the previous one but I realized that:
- There was not much new ground to cover since the previous episode.
- The presentation of this bi-weekly update which is based on āwho dunnnitā is not proper for a video presentation.
- These bi-weekly updates might not need a video to be presented. What Gnomeski does works perfectly as textual format but not as video.
Iāve talked with Gnomeski and others who joined the 2 calls weāve made.
The main issue expressed is for MetaNews to not be something self-indulgent or something that is just nice to have. It should adress a real need and the talks weāve had about it were just about that. Since MetaNews is something that is posted on our socials and Youtube it should be relevant outside the confines of the core of this community. Public-facing content should adress the public.
What is more, as the team responsible for the filming and posting of MetaNews, we have stumbled upon various issues:
- The problems with the quality of preview in Twitter raised the urgent issue of determining platform-suitability.
- Production an MN video is challenging. Editing is time-consuming. I have no studio. We have no definite template. Newsrooms consist of a whole team. Frequency of content canāt be promised if these fundamentals arenāt set.
We have addressed issues of urgency and how fast news move, considering that we are not a professional studio. @_Anna had the wonderful idea of taking some specific news and tracking their progress so as for the news to not get stale. Such are the solutions we need right now.
We are essentially on the design stage and any ideas or proposals are welcome. If people just need news about MetaGame FAST then we could have something like this. We spoke with @_Anna about having a TikTok and having a flash news segment for happenings that are urgent. Not everybody was on board and we must reach a consensus first for such ideas to get going.
But people seemed to like the pilot episode format and want more of this stuff. But this takes time and is not suitable for flash news. For this reason, I and @b0gie decided that itād be better if the episodes are monthly. That way we can make sure that a substantial amount of news has already been gathered and that we can also have the time to edit and make them more aesthetically appealing.
The broadening of MetaNews is not just outwards, it is also inwards. In an important sense, I view the newsletter on Substack as being part of MetaNews only in textual form. Approached in this way, the newsletter works well in the medium. It is not difficult to parse, nor to access and so having video content where the sole source of content is the newsletter is a bit redundant. The concern about different modes of learning and saving time is valid. This is why the newsletter must be covered. But there must be other stuff too. A MetaNews video takes a lot of time to produce and upload so it is better for the filming to be done once substantial amount of news has already been gathered.
The proposed format for these monthly episodes is a hybrid mix between the presentation style I used in the pilot video (with my face in a frame) and the MetaStudio VR background that @b0gie has built. This will make things easier as less editing will be needed and will also be a novel format that can gather a lot of attention. It also provides new ways of creative freedom. Once the setup is fixed and works, then maybe the video can come up at a higher frequency.
Other video content in the intersection of MetaNews and MetaMedia is also on the table such as a Season Close Special which will essentially be the next artifact to be uploaded by MetaNews. This is being actively worked on and will need some broader participation (season report writing, shilling, hoping on cryptovoxels or NEOS on Sunday Funday to gather some video footage).
One a final note is that this raises the need for a way to gather news from all over the place. For this reason I have make a dump for fresh info from all around, The Bucket:
Be free to fill it up!
Having more sources of news will make the content more relevant to the periphery of MetaGame. But this info must be parsed, tracked and written on. This means that new roles will be needed. A journalist is the first priority and can be taken on by somebody from the writerās guild. To make their job easier various tools have been proposed (for scrapping, tracking etc.). This is still an open issue and input is welcome.
All in all, the point is for News to matter and for us to have better content, both in terms of usefulness and in terms of aesthetics.