The Speed of Puchim@s Is the Speed of Anime News

Kotori

FUNimation picked up a cute little IP called PUCHIM@S this season and they decided to announce it in their subscriber-only forum. There was a tweet from the FUNimation account to let people know the news is out. After the fact, I took a look at the timing and both the forum post and the tweet hits 12 Noon Eastern time on the dot, or roughly 1 minute later, on Jan. 10th 2013.

A bit of background–FUNimation’s elite video service (which is what I meant by subscriber) is generally panned. I have been using it for about 6 months and I can see why. At any rate most news hounds don’t use it, but they probably have access to it. It took the following time for these news pieces to hit twitter after the initial announcement:

Crunchyroll: 23 minutes

FandomPost: 37 minutes

Anime News Network: 40 minutes

That’s pretty much it for the full-time staff efforts.

As far as I can tell there was no heads-up PR to prime them. ANN is pretty notable about having that often, but I guess not this time.

Also, it is only fair to say that this one anecdote does not indicate if CR or Chris B. or ANN is faster at breaking news. It’s more about a reaction time sort of thing–how fast can people pick up the news, in a way that, I think, measures fairly. Everybody in this case probably followed the same tip trail to the source, unless someone had a head’s up or, in the unfortunate case, were actually keeping tabs on the FUNi EVS forum. It’s like a drop of water landing on a perfectly stilled pool, and measuring the wavelengths of its ripples.

As a matter of disclosure, you all know I also write for a site that often post news (but we don’t really try to break via speed, as fun as that can be once in a while). It took me 11 minutes to copy-paste the EVS post and write some basic instructions into an email to send it to our tip line, and one more minute to post the same copy-pasta on a forum that I read.

PS. Nobody in my timeline picked up the news until one of the news orgs broke it. That shows you how panned FUNi EVS really is. Or maybe we’re all just polite? I don’t know.

PPS. To its redemption, ANN is now the first to break Senren Kagura’s simulcast news that was announced on Jan 11th, 18 minutes after noon. The forum post about Puchim@s indicated another license would be announced today at noon eastern (11am central), but the forum post for Senren kagura actually went up at 10:18am central time today, which is kind of amusing. Anyway.

PPPS. Amuse-bouche. What the.


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