Op/Ed: Thank you ANN

I realize that I haven't given out a whole lot of information on myself. And mostly I'll admit it's laziness, and the realization that no one really cares. But for any of this opinion article to make sense I have to give you a little background.

I went to college for journalism and wrote more than 300 articles for my college newspaper, The Daily Evergreen. If you don't believe me just Google Cameron Probert and it'll show up. (Yes I do vanity searches, I'm not too proud to admit it.)

So that said I've had a three year long love/hate relationship with Anime News Network. It finally came to a head about a year ago when they printed a rumor that Otakon was going to shut down/restrict the Artist's Alley.

And they were wrong.

Now that wouldn't have been so bad, if they hadn't then turned around and said "Well we thought it would be better if we printed it now." They didn't apologize for being lazy. They didn't say "Oh wait, we were wrong to run it." They didn't even do it right the first time. It was one of the worst pieces of reporting that I've ever seen. So bad in fact that it almost made me start my own blog to counter them. That fell through, but my general distaste for the Site didn't fade much.

Until yesterday. When I read Zac Bertschy's interview with Eric P. Sherman, the president of Bang/Zoom!, I thought I was going to fall out of my chair with a heart attack. It is the single best piece of reporting that I've seen come out of that Site. Not only did he bring up important questions about the state of the R1 industry, but he also took the company to task for its handling of the AnimeTV program. And when Sherman tried to dodge the question, he kept at it.

Seriously, it's so good that I whole heartedly reccomend it. It's made me believe that reporting CAN be done in this industry, if people are willing to try hard enough. That Blogs and News sites can disseminate useful and illuminating information and maybe, just maybe, I can stop resenting Anime News Network for having the ability to do these things and just dropping the ball.

Thank you ANN