You Can’t PiQ the Interest of the Dead
Just talk to people who used to run Ex. They’ll tell you that if e-zines were dead, then printed zines are living on borrowed time. New geek zines are not gonna fly unless you really push, and that cost lots of money.
And I guess this guy had the misfortune to learn it the hard way. And to be fair, it wasn’t terribly executed by any means. PiQ, while alive, had some value. But like most new blogs, it had an identity crisis.
It also occurred to me, because on my Google Reader I put Gia’s news blog in the same category with other news sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, that her blog is just really shaping up into, well, the anime version of those news editorial blogs. It’s a bit like Author’s little joint, functionally, but with the intensity of a thousand nontenki moe dolls. Gia is even a letter away from Giz, for what it is worth. The blog has even those crappy photoshopped pictures that breaks the news for you. Only God will know what will happen when we clone it with science and multiply the throughput.
WTB cloned Zepy, btw.
And I think this is a good approach. We need something like this to interface fans with corporate interests. Avatar’s rants about taking abuse from fans, as industry online persons, is not without merit. Many anime industry guys of today used to be fans just like us, but things don’t work the same once you’re on the other side of the transaction. The corollary is that a lot of those people will and do talk to fans, because that’s who they are; that’s how they learn it the hard way. From a news-bot’s perspective, the hard part is to be able to encapsulate their thoughts in a way that provides anonymity and enough sensitivity that doesn’t piss people off. That means you gotta have the network and the professional insight, and a lot of people who look fondly at your operation.
But that also means a certain casualness and professional detachment that does not fit this particular organization…although they are up to the task. Maybe that we don’t have something like MOON PHASE in English (I suppose AoDVD is the next best thing) is a sign that the scene is not big enough yet.
Anyways, internet journalism is definitely not like old school journalism when it comes to finding the right pitch to sell your material. For starters, do we even know if there’s enough people reading (ie. $ in the pot)? The ABA reportedly has over 10k unique visitors over the course of its run, which nets about total Alexa rank on par (if a little better) with a typical, 2-year-old anime blog that has built up a readership. If you are the Prince of British East India Company, you can do better… And there are other ways. I mean, this is not bad at all, and we know 90+% of the traffic goes to like, 3 sites on AB.
I guess it’s still not good enough? Just how do we do this journalism thing right when it comes to anime? Did someone do it and I missed it?
Until you linked to it, I’d never heard of animeblogger.net. It looks like Random Curiousity and Kurogane’s Anime Blog are the only two blogs I ever look at there.
What’s the vertical axis on those Alexa graphs? Percent of what?
As to your bigger topic — I don’t know. Anime On DVD really does come close, except it has a focus on the “what’s released on DVD” world more than anything else. animenation.net/news and animenewsnetwork.com are both worth a look every few days.
But Gia is a real rising star — and she’s taking it seriously, lining up interviews with industry reps and the like.
The Y axis is a representation of % of total users world wide that visits that site. You can read up on Alexa on Wikipedia.
Manual trackback: http://searchofno9.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/in-this-nation-of-the-blind-on-anime-journalism-in-the-age-of-blogging/
I never had a need to look at animenation’s news thing, although there’s that ask John column you know we love to hate :V. Beats most stuff on ANN I suppose.