ABSTRACT
During 1997, groups of students in France, Finland, Wales and Scotland came together in cyberspace to produce a European newspaper collaboratively. Utilising the Internet and video conferencing, they gathered stories and pictures from their locality, but with a wider interest which they sent to other groups for sub-editing. The resulting newspaper was published on the World Wide Web.
The project ran for 6 months and tested the boundaries of modern information technology and telecommunications. It also encompassed two important elections in France and the UK.
This chapter explores the academic reasoning behind the decision to run an international simulation in producing a newspaper. Specifically it has an introduction to simulation gaming research, followed by an investigation of a psychological matrix model and then looks at previous media simulations in more technologically challenged times. It then goes on to describe how the simulation was carried out, the various newspaper and magazine formats employed, the technical problems encountered and overall student appreciation of the project.
The project was a pilot and this article aims to encourage others to run their own version of TENSAL in the future, and points out possible pitfalls.
