Ananova

» see ananova.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ananova was a picture i knew before it was a product i understood. in 2000 i was a teenager in turkey on a dial-up modem, and a green-haired cartoon woman reading the news was the kind of thing that showed up in a magazine screenshot, not on a screen i actually visited. she was british, a press association project that for a moment the whole industry decided was the shape of things to come.

the press association built her as a synthetic presenter who could read headlines twenty-four hours a day without a studio or a salary. orange bought the company for ninety-five million pounds in july 2000, months after launch, back when a virtual avatar felt like it might be worth that. she got a personality on paper, a face modeled loosely on a few pop-star and tv faces of the moment, and a job reading the web's news out loud.

the trouble was that the animation stayed stiff and the voice stayed robotic while everyone kept expecting it to get better. it did not, not fast enough. so orange retired the character in 2004 and kept the ananova name on a plain text news site for a few more years. by 2010 even the name was gone, folded into orange's own news brand. the future of news turned out to be a person after all.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

strip away the hype and ananova was a news website with a mascot bolted on the front. the mascot got all the press and none of the traffic. what people actually read was the quirkies section, a feed of strange short news items that had nothing to do with the avatar. that feed outlived the green hair by years, which tells you where the value really sat.

~ the funny part ~

ananova's longest cultural afterlife came from karl pilkington on the ricky gervais show, who kept citing bizarre ananova stories years after the character was dead. a virtual newsreader built to look like the future ended up remembered as the source of a comedian's weird trivia. the avatar was the pitch. the odd little stories were the thing anyone kept.

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