Breaking news: Crunchyroll will now simulcast manga, too

Anime, Journalism

kun_gao_crunchyroll

Here’s my dirty secret: there’s still one thing I pirate. Every month I go to a scanlation site to read the latest Attack on Titan manga chapter. I justify it to myself by saying it’s the only way I can get it in English. It’s true, but that doesn’t make it right.

Today, Crunchyroll will end my pirating ways for good. They’ve just announced Crunchyroll Manga, a partnership with manga publisher Kodansha that will allow English speakers to digitally read manga at the very same time it is released in Japan.

Crunchyroll Manga will begin with legal English translations, but CEO Kun Gao says it will eventually include every language Crunchyroll shows are currently available in (French, Spanish, and Portuguese). The first available manga chapters are of course all Kodansha titles, including Attack on Titan and Fairy Tale.

“Today’s manga audience is extremely underserved,” said Gao. “They have to either pirate, or wait a year to read books in print. Our goal is to make manga as accessible and affordable as possible.”

Believe it or not, reading new manga on Crunchyroll won’t actually cost anything. If you’re a non-paying member, you can read the latest chapter at the same time as everyone else, just with ads. (It’s a change from the way Crunchyroll does anime, where non-paying members get episodes one week after paying subscribers do.) But if you’d like to go back into the archives and read more than just the latest chapter, you’ll have to pay for it.

A subscription to just Crunchyroll Manga will cost $4.95 a month. But if you’re an all-access member of Crunchyroll, you’ll notice that manga has already been added to your account for no additional cost. Gao also said the company has no plans to raise the monthly price of an all-access membership despite the new manga feature.

Readers will be able to view manga chapters on Crunchyroll’s website and all currently supported mobile devices.

Gao said he hopes this feature will not only make it easier for fans to read manga, but to sample and try a larger volume of manga than they’ve previously been able to afford (or had the time to illegally download).

Now, I have no reason to pirate. And I’ll probably read a lot more manga now than just Attack on Titan. Do you think the announcement will have an affect on your manga consumption?

A tour of Crunchyroll’s office

Uncategorized

cr1

Last week, you guys helped make my post about Crunchyroll one of the most popular Otaku Journalist posts of all time. This week, I wanted to give you more.

It’s a really fortunate coincidence that I’m in San Francisco for work this week. So when Crunchyroll’s CEO, Kun Gao, offered to let me tour Crunchyroll’s San Francisco office, I was able to say yes.

Crunchyroll is located in the Financial District of San Francisco, one of my favorite parts of the city. It’s across the street from the Daiso, a Japanese-style dollar store. It’s a short walk from Minamoto Kitchoan, a bakery where all the sweets are flown in from Japan.

cr2

The first thing I noticed was the brightly-colored wall on the first floor, leading me upstairs. Crunchyroll lives on the building’s two upper floors. The move was recent, earlier this year from a South Beach location, the better to accommodate its now 50-person staff. (There’s also a Tokyo office in Harajuku, but with just three employees.)

cr3

Kun met me in one of the conference rooms, Seele. Each of the rooms’ names is an Evangelion in-joke. The phone rooms are even named Units 01 and 00!

cr4

Here’s one of the workspaces. More than 50 percent of Crunchyroll employees are engineers. If you’re good with computers, Kun said Crunchyroll is always looking to hire more talented, anime-loving engineers. Just email them.

cr5

The office boasts a lounge area with just about every console imaginable. Unfortunately, it’s not really for fun, but to test the Crunchyroll app on various systems.

cr6

Here’s the corner where they used to shoot Crunchyroll TV. They haven’t done it for a while, as you can tell by the messiness. But it does highlight the one most eye-catching parts of the Crunchyroll office—the exorbitant amount of anime merchandise. There are shows, figures, and toys everywhere.

cr7

On the top floor, there’s an outdoor balcony!

cr8

If you look down, you can see the Daiso across the street.

That’s all for now, but that’s not all. Check Otaku Journalist again at 12 AM Pacific Time (3 PM Eastern) for some exciting news about the future of Crunchyroll, which I heard straight from the CEO himself! Update: I got the time a little off, but the post is live!

Sorry to tease. In journalism this is what we call an embargo, where I make a promise not to break news before the company does. But believe me, it’s worth coming back for.

Meet the UK team that turned manga into a career

Careers

crosshatch1

Outside of Japan, heck, even inside of Japan, the road to a career in manga is risky. It’s not enough just to have raw talent.

Manga artist Elena Vitagliano knew that even being the 2011 first place winner of the UK’s premier manga contest, Manga Jiman, wasn’t enough. So she came up with what I think is a pretty ingenious idea: she invited four other artists who’ve won the contest over the years to join a manga collective, Cross#atch.

Need an illustrator, a portrait artist, or a workshop instructor? The idea behind Cross#atch is that you can go to one place and find all of England’s top manga talent there. Hailing from diverse backgrounds—Vitagliano is Italian; her colleagues hail from Portugal, Libya, China, and England—their work is equally impressive but distinct.

Elena reached out to me in September to ask if I’d like to review a copy of Cross#hatch’s debut book, Hatchlings. It’s basically all four of their winning entries (two of the five are collaborators) in one volume, bookended with a cute visual story of the artists’ avatars meeting for the first time. Title pages are in color, chapters are in black-and-white.

crosshatch2

The artistic styles are certainly varied, but each story reveals a common theme of self discovery. But since there aren’t any links to buy the book, that’s not what my review is focusing on. I’m more impressed by how these artists devised a strategy to stand out by teaming up together.

In creative fields it can be especially tough to stand out. But when Elena put her ego aside and invited the people that should be her competition to join her collective, she really increased her chances of success. Even if people who buy a Cross#atch book or attend one of their drawing workshops prefer another artist’s style, for example, that’s still attention that goes toward the collective. And the more people are talking about it, the more likely it is that Elena will find her perfect customers.

I can see this technique working not just for illustrators, but for cosplay accessory creators, photographers, and even indie game designers. More people means more content and variety, which means more clients and buzz. To me, the fact that’d she’d gotten so much top talent to work together was the most interesting part of Elena’s pitch.

Cross#atch can be found on their website and Facebook page. Want to order Hatchlings? Email ink@crosshatchink.com.

Want to pitch me something geeky or anime-oriented to review on my blog for my 10,000 monthly readers? Hit me up.

Otaku Links: Pigeons need love, too

Otaku Links

hatoful_boyfriend

  • “Good” news! You can now buy Hatoful Boyfriend, the world’s only pigeon dating sim, legally in English for $1.50. If you haven’t heard, it’s a hilariously homicidal game in which you play as a human girl attending a posh school for birds.
  • It’s almost Halloween and nobody can spell “spooky” correctly. It’s not that Tumblr has turned into a horde of zombies. It’s a meme, of course.
  • Wanted to let you guys know that I now work full time for ReadWrite, which means you can read even more of my reporting on social media, robots, Bitcoins, and the future in general here. It’s been a crazy ride this year going from unemployed to freelance to full time, and I’ll be sure to write about it in more detail soon.

(Screenshot via Hatoful Boyfriend.)

 

The human journalist’s guide to reporting

Journalism

navy_yard_shooting

Last week, my husband’s coworker came back to work for the first time since she was shot. It was, to put it harshly, about one month after everyone stopped caring about the shooting.

As was the case for many people in the DC area, the Navy Yard shooting affected my family deeply. My husband worked in the building where the shooting took place every day for over a year. He was not there on that day, but it didn’t make it any less unnerving. If the shooting had taken place just a month or two earlier, he would surely have been.

For my husband and I, the Navy Yard shooting is still a specter that hangs over our lives. We don’t think of our offices as safe anymore. And yet, our daily fear isn’t going to make any headlines; and hasn’t since September 19. The modern news cycle works like a searchlight, one journalism theory goes, hovering briefly over one event before moving on to the next new thing.

In the backs of our minds, we realize that there are still people to whom previous shootings like Newtown, Aurora, and even Virginia Tech are always going to be front page news, especially if they lost a loved one. As the searchlight of the media moves ceaselessly onward, there are those of us who get left behind.

If I weren’t such a geek, I’d probably call my theory of Otaku Journalism “The Human Being’s Guide to Reporting.” I think humanity is what’s missing in the modern media. There’s always a personal story behind front page news, and I don’t think it’s one that should be discarded after just a day. Because events like Monday’s Nevada school shooting aren’t just about the facts.

Shootings are ordinary now. But not the people involved. John’s coworker is a woman with a story. At her welcome back party, she talked about feeling the presence of God while she was lying there with a gunshot wound. She talked about telling off Joe Biden when he came to visit her in the hospital. Hearing about her passion, anger, and tenacity is riveting.

The searchlight theory of news says that journalists cover events only briefly and superficially because this is what the audience wants. Does anyone really believe that? Just like fiction, journalism is best when it’s about people. Take this great report from The Verge about vaccine deniers, whom I’ve always regarded as a bunch of crazies. This article humanizes them, and made me realize that they’re not malicious people, just terrified for their children’s health.

I also love what journalist Laurie Penny says about the importance of relating to her audience. “One of my least favourite things… is to be told I need to ‘grow a thick skin.’ I’m a writer. A thick skin is literally the last thing I need.”

Just imagine the drop in troll comments that could result from journalists who appeal to their audiences’ humanity. And the synchronous increase in cultural understanding.

There’s always room for empathy in the news.

(Photo by Charles Dharapak, AP.)