Tiny robot has lessons for media - and citizens

Whether the science-fiction movie "Wall-E" is a huge hit or just a moderate one doesn't matter. It is an audacious film, well-loved, critically acclaimed - the latest in a string of success for Pixar Animation Studios, which began with "Toy Story" in 1995 and has issued one nearly flawless 100-minute tale after another.

The company has made a ton of money. So much, in fact, that it was purchased at a premium by Disney, the once mighty animation house that's become tumbledown.

Pixar's production - nine movies in total, a bunch of shorts - makes the digital atelier the most consistent studio in cinema's history. Its 16-acre campus is crammed with good directors, talented people. But the company's success owes at least as much to a ruthless and collaborative process in which every idea, every line of every script, must be defended to the crowd. That's where Pixar has something to teach us - both journalists and Americans in general.

With a few notable exceptions, achievement is both an individual and a collective thing. You can be Alex Rodriguez, but if you're stuck on this year's Yankees, you're still struggling toward the top of the division. Limitations are a given in team sport, in a platoon, in a corporate division: One star is never enough.

Somehow, though, we forget that when it involves creative endeavors, including mine. I know what I do looks easy, and compared with real work, it is. But you should see how many people spend their day keeping me from looking like a fool - editors, colleagues, people who design this page, or take my picture. Without them, I'm just a barely literate guy with half-formed ideas.

A society as ecumenical, egalitarian as ours - a spirit fostered now by that great leveler, the Internet - fools everyone into thinking they can do everything. Here's the problem: They can, perhaps, but they won't.

Unpaid bloggers are not going to donate a Tuesday night to watch a four-hour hearing on the tax rate, and then a couple of hours more to communicate what they saw to everyone else. They're not going to slog through 400 pages of documents to figure out that a city employee spent public money on new tires. Let alone do that over and over again.

Even if they were willing, who is going to volunteer time to ensure that work is accurate and full and thoughtful? Believe it or not, writers need editors, and I don't trust a guy whose online alias is a penis joke.

You get what you pay for. Information is no different. Doing this well - covering local news, commenting on it - takes an expensive organization.

Panicked by that, and by narrowing profit margins, some struggling newspapers are dropping people like a retriever sheds hair, and with about as much concern. With reporters and editors gone, surviving newspapers will be worse, so they'll make less money, so they'll jettison more people and wonder why nobody reads them.

So what takes a newspaper's place? Does anything?

I'm not optimistic. The Internet has been a major force for more than a decade now, and no real rivals to local news gathering have shown themselves. With a few exceptions, bloggers spend their time complaining about or amplifying stories traditional journalists have written. In newspapers.

All this should matter more than it does. But Americans are becoming increasingly indiscriminate consumers of news and information, which makes us increasingly indiscriminate citizens.

The process by which good ideas survive and are honed into better ones, where capable work is improved, where judgment is questioned and challenged and revised, can't be done by a single person, no matter how many comments he draws.

It's by definition collaborative and competitive, where the best idea wins. It's Pixar.

I'm not suggesting newspapers have much in common with that company. But newspapers, good ones, are made up of people all trying to produce the best journalism they can. It takes a crowd not because one person couldn't do everything, but because more minds make smarter newspapers.

That's what we're losing, because the Web demands that information be free, or at least too cheap to support a crowd. Someday, Pixar may face similar pressures. Disney, Pixar's owner and inspiration, already did, and its own animation operation is now a shadow - financially, artistically - of what it once was.

Even as Disney was dying, though, Pixar was already ascendant. There is no such analogue for us.

If Pixar goes the way of Disney, it would be an incomparable loss for lovers of great cinema. If competent local news gathering disappears, it's a loss for citizenship. Your call on which is worse.

Donald Luzzatto is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.