I wonder if this will work | Roger Ebert

Jim Bunning stood on the Senate floor ranting about how the Senate had no plan to fund the bill he was blocking. The Senate already knew that. In a show of unanimity, Republicans and Democrats together voted to pass the bill by unanimous consent. Only Bunting voted against. He was worried about the National Debt. Today let's instead consider the Internet Debt. When I picture the Internet, it looks curiously like this.

I'm not even thinking about the net's infrastructure. We help pay for that through our service providers. I'm thinking about the content. Who pays for that? For the most part, nobody does. Newspapers, TV networks and magazines spend their good money to give themselves away for free. Some of the best writing I come across is by unpaid bloggers. A site that obviously makes money, like Amazon, nevertheless provides to a huge free database. They could list only books they actually have for sale, but they don't. Of course retail sites have to make money, judging by the money I spend with L. L. Bean. But you know what I mean.

I would hate for my reviews to go behind a paywall. I have around 10,000 of them here. For many years they existed only as a pile of yellowing tear-sheets. You can see me leaning on them in the photo above, in my old Sun-Times office. You wanted to read an old review, I might have let you leaf through. Now here they all are online, being read every day from virtually everyplace in earth. One in Yemen, one in Pago Pago, it adds up. Daniel from Pago Pago is a valued commenter on the blog. Think how great that makes me feel. If I go behind a paywall, however, and a high school student in Mexico is doing some research, there are lots of other excellent critics on the web, and everybody knows it. I'm pretty sure I could get more than 35 subscribers, but a million? ("Gee, Gene, at a penny apiece, what would that come out to?")

This entry is not a pitch for The Ebert Club. It is a justification. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious file of optically scanned tear-sheets, it occurred to be that perhaps the answer was to experiment with Value Added, as the British put it. Keep the site free for everybody, and find out how many readers might be willing to pay a little extra for an additional resource. I enlisted a longtime reader, Marie Haws, to serve as the Club Secretary. She's an artist, a graphic designer, an animator, and, as blog readers know, a Surfing Master. She will oversee our Club Newsletter. I've signed up for it myself.

Well, that's the idea.

For the full pitch and to sign up, click here.

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