Good Anime News sources other than ANN?

[rocklobster]

I've been told that Anime News Network is quite biased and that their site can sometimes give you viruses. Is there an alternative online source that I should look into? Please post them here if you know of any.

[Falx]

I've never heard the virus thing, but the only place they're biased is in their reviews. And then it's less bias and more just not having anybody that you can actually call a good reviewer.

Honestly their news is pretty straightforward and most of it is collected from various blogs, so having all the news together in one spot is fairly useful.

Edit: Blkmage is like the go to guy here for sources, I'm sure he knows of a site or two.

[rocklobster]

Well Roy told me he got a virus twice from them.

[blkmage]

It depends on what you're looking for. For instance, I don't particularly care about North American-centric anime news, so I tend to ignore it until someone tells me something interesting (more on this later).

I don't read ANN for the same reason I don't read particular newspapers; the reviews and editorials make me facepalm and I can get the news elsewhere. Since I use an RSS reader to keep track of my news, centralization isn't a huge problem for me, so that means that I have a ton of sources that cover specific news.

The site that is most like ANN in terms of breadth is probably Japanator, so you'll probably be covered pretty well if you just follow them. Personally, I prefer the MyAnimeList news board just because it's more specific in what kinds of news it covers.

For more obscure news, often involving 2ch shenanigans, I really liked Canned Dogs when zepy was posting more regularly and welcome datacomp. For seiyuu stuff, I like hashihime and Super Noisy Rice Shower Goes Boom!!. For figures, I'm just interested in Nendoroids, so I just follow ミカタンブログ. For Japanese gaming, Siliconera is pretty good. For visual novel news, I follow encubed. And for new anime announcements, moetron is excellent.

But the majority of my interesting news actually comes from my vast information network on twitter and google reader.

[MasterDias]

Viruses? First I've heard of that.

Yeah, ANN's reviews are rather biased. This is particularly evident in their season previews, where I've found them nitpicky on genres they obviously don't like. That said, I've liked some of their columns and having a centralized anime news source is useful, so the reviews are my only real issue.

I second Siliconera as a good source for video game news.

[Hiryu]

Wow, reviews are biased?

Oh, and I've never gotten a virus from ANN.

[blkmage]

I think my favourite ANN review is for the first volume of the Honey and Clover manga, where the reviewer calls Hagu disturbing and repulsive and manages to attribute her character design and personality to lolicon and general Japanese misogyny. I mean, comparatively, K-ON! is low-hanging fruit for the herp derp moe thing, so I'm pretty impressed that someone can just go for it and miss the point of a thing so thoroughly.

[Roy Mustang]

It's happen. But it was ad sites that ANN uses. This has been over a year now that something like this has happen at ANN.

I stop going there, after I had hijack links from what their ads that run. This matter has happen to others as well and even one time, me and a few people that I know, anti virus programs block ANN, because it was sending you to off to other page and not ANN.


When this happen, I ask Mith look into it and he look at the coding that ANN was running and something was up big time on it.

From what it looks like, it the ads that ANN has used in the past and it was doing something to their script.

At this time, I don't trust ANN at all and have never been back to it over that reason. It has happen on their site and even members of their message board have reported them to ANN. This was over a year ago, but I feel that their coding and security is crappy. I still remember that one time, their site got hijack one day and if they can't have better security then that, I will not use them.

Well Roy told me he got a virus twice from them.

To clear this up. I got one once from them and two other times, my anti virus program block ANN as it was telling me, the site was a threat as it was trying to make me to one of sites that they had an add for on ANN.

[font="Book Antiqua"][color="Red"]Col. Roy Mustang[/color][/font]

[ShiroiHikari]

Everyone should be running AdBlock Plus for Firefox.

Also ANN is okay as a news source and as a database but I don't really use them for anything else. Thanks for all the sauces, blkmage. I should try using an RSS whatchathingy.

[tojik]

More than bias, I think their reviews just aren't that well written. It's possible to read a review you strongly disagree with and still find it enlightening, but a lot of the review writing on ANN just feels heavy handed.

IMO the best part of ANN is archive diving... there's the encyclopedia and some well written columns (House of 1000 Manga, Buried Treasure, Mike Toole Show) that are dedicated to dredging up cool old stuff. So it's more distinctive in its non-news.

[blkmage]

I think a huge problem of their is their posturing as a legitimate news organization. Bloggers have the luxury of not having to worry about that so they're free to write as slanted as they wish, since no one is expecting neutrality from them and they tend to make their tastes and biases pretty clear. ANN can't do that because they're trying to set themselves up as authoritative and aren't doing a very good job at it. So when they try to speak from a position of authority, no one pays attention except to point and laugh.