Sundance attracts big news media from around the globe. Even the smaller Slamdance has international pull for its big events. Variety, the entertainment industry journal and copies of The New York Times are stacked around the Sundance headquarters and in various festival venues while they report on the festival. The Hollywood Reporter, CNN and all the major news networks and celebrity-driven news shows send crews to record stars and try to get the early word on films to its audience.

But the force covering Sundance is more diverse than just traditional journalists covering a beat. The Internet has provided a way for cinema fan diehards to follow and even report on movies. There are bloggers of course, but fan film sites have sprung up over the last two decades and they are something different.

AintItCoolNews (www.aintitcool.com) was started in 1996, the first of many sites made by film fans reporting on what they loved. Founder Harry Knowles took his movie-fan mentality from news groups to form an official Web site that was both influential and popular. As the site and imitators grew, the Internet suddenly held sway over the opinions of movie viewers and therefore box office dollars.

AintItCool is at Sundance this year in the persona of Eric Vespe, known better by his on-line handle "Quint." (The name comes from the sea captain of the same name played by Robert Shaw in "Jaws.") While he and his cohorts aren't journalists by traditional standards, film studios and Sundance certainly recognize them as such. Vespe had no trouble attaining a press pass.

"There are definitely still people that don't understand the Internet and view us as kind of stupid fans," Vespe said in an interview with the Deseret Morning News while traveling to Sundance. "There are a whole bunch of people in the studios that get it. They are being put in as new junior execs and just getting into power; the read us when they were in high school or college and started as a fan of this kind of coverage.

"Honestly even the stalwarts are accepting now that the Net is how people are getting their news."

Sundance, as in independent festival, is even easier for AICN.

"With festivals there have never been any problems (getting credentials). The filmmakers and publicists usually tend to be readers of the site and know that when we love something we'll champion it."

Fan sites can help create buzz for a film that often leads to big box office, and for small films desperate to find an audience, a movie site with loyal fans is pretty attractive.