Most reporters learn the tools of the trade on the job: school-board meeting, campaign trail, war zone. Some attend hostile-environment trainings offered by journalism schools (lesson plan: car bomb, tourniquets, and screaming actors; mock kidnapping and buckets of fake blood). Recently, a magazine writer was doomscrolling in bed when he spotted an out-there tweet: crisis and conflict training for journalists, offered in three-hundred-and-sixty-degree room-scale 4K V.R. Sold.
In 2019, two foreign correspondents turned virtual-reality entrepreneurs, Kate Parkinson and Aela Callan, got a grant from the British government to develop a virtual journalism course. “I might still be doing journalism if I had better training,” Parkinson said, on a video call from Kent. Her hair was pink, cut in a bob, and she wore a white V-neck. “I was working in Libya, in 2011, and my cameraman and I were covering the fall of Qaddafi.” A vacant look crossed her face. “I saw him effectively blown to pieces.” She went on, “I had some training, and, you know, supposedly knew what to do. But, in the moment, I didn’t have a clue. I completely froze.” She shook her head. “What if I had been able to do the training the day before I stepped on the plane?”
Hostile-environment training with the help of virtual reality, she said, will let reporters access the skills they need when they need them. “More training more often is the answer,” she said.
Callan, who wore a sleeveless white top and Apple earbuds, joined the call. In a virtual environment, she said cheerfully, “mistakes are free.” She likened the experience to “a virtual field trip!”
So that the journalist might try taking such a trip, Callan overnighted him a cardboard box. Inside was a portal to another world. The journalist opened his laptop and joined a few other participants in cyberspace for a morning of whiteboard sessions led by Callan and Chris Post, a first responder and photojournalist, who runs a Web site called JournalistSafety.com.
“Has anyone been teargassed?” Callan asked. “You want to be careful not to jump in a hot shower. It’ll reactivate the chemicals.”
“I would caution against using milk for an eyewash solution,” Post added.
Simulation time. The journalist eagerly unboxed and tried on his new virtual-reality goggles, which had hundred-and-one-degree high-fidelity F.O.V. and built-in spatial stereo speakers (and retailed for six hundred and ninety-nine dollars). He tightened the head straps and pressed the power button. Callan’s voice bellowed from the Zoom call: “Get your headsets on! Are you all in the white room? The big white lobby? What do you see?”
The journalist saw computer-generated park benches, street lights, plane trees—wait, what’s that? A crowd of far-right protesters had appeared on the horizon. (The simulation was created using motion capture and C.G.I.) They were glowing red! His living room was transformed: a gray sofa started chugging beer; a round kitchen table shouted, “Fuck you, fake news! You lying piece of shit!” The journalist bumped into his bookshelf as the crowd swelled into a mob: “Lying fucking maggots!”
Outside the journalist’s apartment, two sanitation workers piled garbage bags into a diesel-powered truck. A man in a backward ball cap walked with his daughter, holding her hand. Meanwhile, in the simulation, the journalist watched as the mob shouted sexist comments and threw Molotov cocktails at a line of police decked out with riot shields. “Get back! Get back!” the cops shouted. A police van exploded in a cloud of smoke.
The virtual night air was filled with sirens and shouting, and the journalist tasted that metallic, get-me-out-of-here adrenaline flavor at the back of his mouth.
Ding, ding, ding. Dinggggggg. “Hello?”
The journalist’s neighbor had decided to drop in. “What are you doing!” the journalist could hear her ask, from his doorway. He knew she was staring at his goggle-clad head.
“Er, well . . . ,” he stammered, removing the goggles and holding them up for her to try.
She strapped them on. “It looks like a crime scene,” she yelped. “I don’t like that.” She handed the goggles back and said, “I had a very close interaction with a rat yesterday!”
Back in the simulation, the journalist found himself surrounded: tear gas, broken glass, a police dog glowing purple and blue. Nearby, where his neighbor had just been standing in real life, several protesters attacked a colleague dressed in jeans and a face mask. “Fuck you!” a protester said, knocking the colleague down. “Fake news!” another man shouted, kicking the colleague viciously.
The field trip faded into darkness, and a voice came through the goggles’ speakers: “Notice how you’re feeling. If you could rate your physiological state on a scale of one to ten, what would it be?” The journalist had goosebumps.
Afterward, over Zoom, Callan asked the group to debrief the session.
“I felt rather helpless,” one correspondent said, shyly.
“I felt a little tingly.”
“I was surprised at how much a virtual experience could elevate my pulse.”
Reality beckoned. The journalist closed his laptop and went outside. A big rat crossed his path. ♦
"conflict" - Google News
October 25, 2021 at 05:02PM
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Conflict Reporting Goes Virtual - The New Yorker
"conflict" - Google News
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