Filing through the steady and ever increasing flow of press releases ANS receives from the various industry companies out there this week it occured to me that the past five and a half years has seen substantially measurable changes in the way industry presents it's products and structures it's general business moves for the mass consumership's consumption. A bit of thought and research on the matter has inspired this article.
The internet has clearly made the greatest impact on the en masse PR aparatus of the North American industry. For the first half of the 1990's print publications (Animerica, Previews), word of mouth (con announcements, fan/club talk) and very marginal internet exchanges (IRC/Newsgroups) served as prime outlets for diseminating the latest goings ons domestically. Oddly enough, 7 years after the birth of the WWW no one had taken up the reigns of maintaining a dedicated Anime News website. January 1998 saw the launch of ANS and the following months saw the subsequent emergence of a multitude of other news sites, many of which are still around today. The advent of one to one to everyone message board interaction between fans and producers has further spun the changing dynamic of representation online.
Gradually, the anime news and consumption cycle began to change from the once a month system of many magazines to the currently existing 24/7/365 cycle in place today. But it was an incrimental process, in the early days just finding the right person or persons to talk to about the release of a product was difficult and understandably so. 5 years ago saw very few job dedicated PR reps in the NA industry with many folks signing onto a company only to cover production, editing, product packaging, 5 or 10 other things and ah yes PR also.
As companys grew, the niche evolved from a subculture to a marginal fad to an underground sensation (always coming short of the elusive "mainstream" moniker) and coffers began filling with the loot offered thusly by fandom people could afford to be hired and assigned to fill these dedicated positions. Fast forwarding to the present day, many companies these days still overwhellmingly tend to represent themselves.The really large ones now outsource the packaging and distribution of their information to retained PR firms. Others keep press release generation in house, hiring dedicated reps with educations and backgrounds in doing nothing but PR. Still others are employed folks within a company who move around to take this postion or yes there are those who still wear the PR cap along with several others.
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