[UPDATE: Scott e-mailed me regarding this, and at this point I think the best would be to retract the whole thing with apologies. He denies any casual connection between receiving access and stringent editorial position, therefore "sold out" is bogus. I'm leaving this post up for the future readers to know what an idiot I am.]

I remember the flap caused by Hung reviewing free DVDs, but compared to the evolution of Anime Almanac, Hung's story is nothing at all. Benefits that Hung received were miniscule, and he continued his old editorial policies. Scott, however, completely turned around ever since he started to play a journalist. He sold out for access [1].

It's not anything new. Access is precious for journalists. Off the top of my head I can remember how Linley Gwennap's Microprocessor Report has came to be known as "Intelprocessor Report", and how CNN's Eason Jordan ran Saddam's propaganda on CNN.

Scott's current editorial slant is rather prominent in the article:

But when the summer season came around, ANN didn’t post any reviews of unlicensed anime. This lead me to believe that ANN realized it was a mistake and they would never do it again, and I was very pleased with them about that.

Well… it turns out that wasn’t the case. In fact, ANN thought that the Spring Preview was one of the most successful things they have ever done. In their own words, they wanted to beat “those dastardly anime bloggers” to the punch with this content, and they believe that they did just that. Traffic was huge for their fansub reviews, and as we all know, more traffic equals more ad money for the site. If they had enough resources to do it for the summer, they would have. And for now they are planning on doing it again for this upcoming fall season.

At least he reports the facts (unlike CNN).

On the topic of ANN, I remember that Spring Preview thing well. What amazed me the most was the extremely poor quality of articles, for a website with such lofty aspirations. Places like Random Curiosity stomp ANN's Spring Preview flat into a bloody pancake (bet you thought Omni just posted a bunch of screencaps; scroll down for writing that was head and shoulders above anything ANN offered). What's important, animebloggers continuously compete. The whole thing is a bubbling soup. As Jason Miao's thin slicing became less relevant, Kuro shot up with his raw efforts, etc. ANN has the eyeball power, which they try to monetize, and then buy the writing. So far it did not work. I say, bring it on, ANN. We, dastardly bloggers, are not afraid in the least.

[1] The weirdest part is, the access was not (officially) conditioned on toeing the party line. Scott would still had his badge even if he took a more even-handed editorial line on fansubs.