Cartoon truth: animated recreations may be the next big thing for the news biz.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

HONG KONG BILLIONAIRE Jimmy Lai has a plan to save the news, and it doesn't involve paying freelancers $2 to write stories about whatever people are Googling, or pitting the city desk against the local symphony's bassoon section in a bid for foundation dollars. Instead, he's sticking with an approach publishers have used for centuries: Go heavy on crime. Go heavy on sex. Go heavy on celebrity scandals. And if a 73-page police interview transcript involving a masseuse's allegations that Al Gore assaulted her in a Portland hotel room surfaces, don't settle for a text-based summary that references a few of the weirdest passages behind the word "allegedly." Make an animated video out of it!

Lai has been in the print news business for 15 years, publishing a handful of tabloids in Hong Kong and Taipei. But he apparently anticipates a day when even photos of car crashes and semi-naked models will seem too much like reading. In 2007 Lai invested $30 million to create an animation studio. For two years, its approximately 200 staffers devised workflow systems and built up a digital library of 3D objects, and in September 2009 the company, known as Next Media Animation (NMA), started producing clips for Lai's Apple Daily websites. It can create these short clips, which typically combine animation sequences with photos, video, and voice-overs, in as little as two hours. The results resemble a cross between Inside Edition and The Sims.

In December 2009, NMA scored its first big hit: a dramatization of Tiger Woods' car crash. The clip includes two versions of the accident. The first follows the official police report narrative, while the second features sensational but unconfirmed allegations lifted from a TMZ.com story, with Woods' wife Elin Nordegren slapping him in the face then chasing him with a golf club.

"That Tiger Woods animation was very entertaining, but it was nothing approaching journalism," Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz complained to CNN World in February. "It didn't look like journalism. It didn't smell like journalism. It didn't feel like journalism. So let's not confuse a bunch of cartoons with what people in the news business do."

The video game aesthetics and occasional comic touches of NMA's clips may seem more suited to satire than rigorous reporting. But the animations' intent--to vividly portray incidents that weren't documented firsthand--has plenty of precedent in the news business. In the 1920s, a short-lived tabloid...