2026 seems to be the year of media degradation. Publications fight against bots that scrape articles, false information provided by Google’s Gemini, and outright plagiarism from generative AI like ChatGPT. It’s quickly becoming impossible to engage without a tweak here and a search engine change there, and even still, it’s a constant task to train the eye to what’s accurate and what’s just slop.
Yet in an increasingly disruptive AI landscape, there’s another online publication dedicated to exploring anime, manga, and the global communities that engage, create, and drive media to be much more engrossing: Anime Herald.
Speaking the universal language of otaku, Anime Herald is a reader-supported website that has been delivering articles and publications to a wide range of diverse writers and readers since 2010. So, when given the chance, Anime Feminist’s own Cy Catwell digitally sat down with Editor-in-Chief and Founder of Anime Herald, Samantha “Sam” Ferreira, to talk about what making not just one, but two, physical magazines in 2026’s media landscape is like.
Q: Take us through what inspired you to decide to publish the first physical edition of Anime Herald in 2025 and why it matters to you on a personal level.
To be fully honest, I was hoping to publish a magazine for Anime Herald’s tenth anniversary. I was looking into publishing a smaller, zine-sized publication that would compile a handful of our favorite articles… something very much in the spirit of what Giant Robot FM are doing. (Seriously, they’re making something special and I can’t say enough nice things about them!)
Unfortunately, our anniversary coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns. It would’ve been in poor taste to do some big, flashy celebration, given that we were in the middle of lockdowns, and deaths from COVID had topped over one million. Even if that weren’t the case, though, I would’ve been unable to fund such an idea to begin with. I worked in the travel industry at the time and was furloughed, leaving us with no way to finance things.
So, we ultimately decided to shelve things in favor of a small, celebratory article.
It never really left the back of my mind, though, and it became something I talked about with friends and confidants as a “Hey, this would be cool” type of thing. In December 2023, I started thinking about our next milestone anniversary, and I started talking with Yatta-Tachi founder Katy Castillo about it in earnest in 2024.
As for why it matters to me, that’s a tough one. I guess it’s because anime magazines were a big part of my own fandom journey. Publications like Animerica and Protoculture Addicts were an entryway into the anime world for folks who didn’t have access to BBSes (Bulletin Board System), forums, or the like—or didn’t have a means of acquiring imports or accessing anime club libraries. They were where folks turned for the latest news, reviews, and interviews with figures in the industry.
And, really, there’s something genuinely magical about being able to buy a time capsule of a particular point in time of a fandom or community, that highlights what people were watching and discussing. It’s a permanent record, which folks can read and enjoy ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future. I want to try to keep that spirit alive, in a world where it feels like everything is growing increasingly digital.
Q: Anime Herald, much like Anime Feminist, prides itself on making space for intersectionality and marginalized fans across a global readership. How do you successfully implement internal and contributor policies that ensure Anime Herald continues to represent the wide variety of fans and not just focus on North American voices?
It’s something that takes a conscious effort as it’s easy to fall back into the old patterns of yesteryear. Our internal policies are built up by a combination of experience and having the humility to listen to the rest of the team. I’m open about asking my team about their thoughts, and listening to their concerns. I try to bring in changes they suggest, and I place a lot of trust in their judgment.
We’re all professionals, and we all have lived experiences that are wholly our own. We all have insights and views that can complement and support each other. And at the end of the day, I have a lot of respect for the folks who work on our team, and who write for us. They’re all talented, passionate folks whom I want to see thriving in this wild community.
And, really, I guess that’s about what my policies are. My ultimate goal has always been to foster an environment where everyone feels welcome; where our contributors can feel free to discuss the topics that are the most important to them.
Q: It’s well known in online spaces that you’ve been working on a personal research project with the goal of publication. What is your general research project and how do you maintain momentum and avoid burnout, even when it’s media you love?
Yes! I’ve been working on a long-term research project that traces the history of the anime industry and community through the early 2010s. I started working on it in 2020 as a smaller-term project that would focus entirely on the anime boom of the 2000s, which culminated in an industry-wide collapse in 2008-ish, leading to a redefinition of the North American anime world. I had been furloughed from my job, and we were all sheltering in-place. So, I started reaching out to folks and listening to their stories.
As I started talking with folks like Tim Eldred, Brian T. Price, and the like, though, it quickly became apparent that the vast majority of our fandom’s shared history is oral in nature. We keep telling stories about things like, say, Save Our Sailors, or the Harmony Gold Robotech saga. And each time, the details change just a bit—an embellishment here, a new wrinkle there, until the story takes on a totally different existence.
So, the scope expanded… quite a lot. It went from a project that would look at a specific, small period, and grew out into a total history. I’ve talked with about sixty to seventy people over the past six years, from across the industry and fandom, and began amassing resources—books, magazines, websites, archived forum and BBS posts, and the like.
Maintaining momentum on it has been, well, a checkered endeavor, to say lightly. Due to the combination of my day job, Anime Herald, and Anime Herald Magazine, I’ve been taking sabbaticals at the end of each year, which usually run from early November until February or early March, depending on workload. These generally involve stepping back from more involved editorial work, and mostly working in an administrative role: final review, approvals, publication, and the like. During those three to four-ish months, I’ll grind away at the draft and try to get as close to completion as possible. Otherwise, once out of Anime Herald Magazine production deadlines, I’ll block out two nights a week to work on it, so that I can maintain a healthy balance.
Sadly, burnout is inevitable when working on a project this big. You’re eventually going to hit a point where you just kind of get frustrated and tired with the subject matter for a bit. It’s something that you don’t want to hit, but it’s going to happen nonetheless. You need to find ways to keep the experience from becoming something you dread.
Personally, one of my biggest ways of finding joy in the anime world, even as I hit that wall, has been the Anime Herald Discord’s anime nights. Every Saturday, a bunch of us get together to watch a couple of hours of anime. It’s always a genuinely fun experience, and it’s helped me to really stay engaged with the medium.
Q: What is your favorite step in the overall editorial process?
Personally, I like that second pass, when all the grammatical and spelling items have been cleaned up, and it’s more a conversation with the writer, as we lock in on what works for the article. It’s nothing hugely transformative—usually a lot of comments like “this needs context,” or “we need sources on XYZ”—but it helps to really make a good piece into a great one.
It forces me to get on the same page as the writer and engage with a piece on a deeper level as I poke around for things like holes in arguments, logical fallacies, and the like. It’s something that I look forward to whenever a piece crosses my desk.
Q: What inspires you to keep working as a journalist and researcher?
Honestly, a lot of it comes from a genuine love of the medium and the community that surrounds it. I’ve been an anime fan for almost my entire life. I’ve been fortunate enough to see so much of the anime fandom we know today get built up, brick by brick, from the anime clubs, to forums, to the social media landscapes we know today.
Over those years, I’ve made many truly wonderful friends and colleagues, who inspire me to keep pushing my limits. Lydia Rivers, Katy Castillo, Seth Burn, and so many others have encouraged me to attempt the impossible, and I can’t thank them enough for putting their faith in me. Through my work, I’ve been fortunate to meet so many passionate fans of all ages—from newcomers that popped into one of my convention panels, to older folks who found one of the articles we’ve published, or fans who have been around as long as I have. And everyone I’ve met over my career, really, has been a source of inspiration and motivation.
Q: What does it mean to you, as an elder anime fan and a professional in the industry, to create a modern print magazine in an era where AI and the public enshittification of textual media is all around you?
My initial reaction is to say I’m terrified! (laughs)
Joking aside, it’s something that I take very seriously. We’re in a world where, as you mentioned, generative AI continues to steal from publications, creators, and artists. Their scrapers hit us with the impact of a literal DDoS, in some cases. Meanwhile, AI slop has continued to become something that assaults our senses regularly with the literary and artistic equivalents of raw sewage. It pollutes both the digital world and the real world in equal measure.
We’ve also seen so many fandom media outlets shutter, shed team members, or get bought outright, even as profits hit all-time highs. From Valnet swallowing Polygon, to Future laying off editorial staff despite record profits, it feels like the doors that were open to writers for so many years are slamming shut, one after the other.Even in the anime world, we saw print magazine Otaku USA cut down from a quarterly publication to a biannual one.
When we started with Anime Herald Magazine’s first issue last year, I was uneasy. I had a lot of questions and worries swirling through my head. As we’ve seen the media landscape degrade, though, I’ve found myself growing more resolute. I want to keep building this publication up for as long as I can, and continue providing a space where writers, designers, and artists can be confident that everything we’re working for won’t be unceremoniously fed into a slop generator, or replaced by a crappy, hallucination-filled output… where we can celebrate this artform that we all love, while paying everyone fairly.
I love the anime community and the folks who make it up. I can only hope that we’ll be able to keep doing this for years to come.
Q: Anime Herald was founded in 2010, almost twenty years ago. Looking ahead, do you have any plans for the twentieth anniversary now that AH is both digital and physical? (Feel free to shoot for the moon with this question as well!)
Oh my God, we are close to twenty years, aren’t we? Time flies…
For the moment, I’m focused entirely on building Anime Herald Magazine into a publication that we can keep being proud of. I’d like to keep elevating writers and publishing articles that remain true to our values, as an organization. Like, I’d love to say something like “I want to put out a 200-page book with original art for every article,” but I have to keep a level head, and think about how we get there, first and foremost.
Realistically, if we can really take off, I’d love to keep evolving, looking to the past at magazines like Animerica and Protoculture Addicts, as well as modern publications like Lock-On or A Profound Waste of Time to serve as our guideposts. But, at the end of the day, no matter what we do, I want to stand by our principles. Regardless of what happens, until the very end, so long as I’m in charge, we’ll be paying a fair rate to our writers, and working with human writers and staffers.
Q: Last question is a fun one: convince our readers to get into Sakura Taisen in a hundred words or less. Go!
Just a hundred words?
I kid, I kid! Sakura Wars is my happy place. It’s a big, sprawling multimedia franchise about psychic song girls and super robots, that spans six mainline games, countless spinoffs, and more than three dozen stage shows. It’s dramatic and funny, heartwarming and soul-crushing in equal measure. In short, it’s… theatrical. The cast is immensely charming, brought to life by incredible actors and writing by living legend Satoru Akahori.
I’ll be writing an article about the series for Anime Herald Magazine #3, so all I can say is “stay tuned.”
