The docs for annotateFcsFile rightly warn that using it will overwrite existing annotations and say to use getFcsFile first. However, getFcsFile[s] returns a list and annotateFcsFile expects a list, so this is tedious to do.
Current method:
fa = data.frame(file$annotations)
annoList = as.list(with(fa, setNames(value, name)))
annoList[["New Anno"]] <- "abcd"