December 2010: Roget Ebert's Journal

Roger Ebert is one of the most influential film critics in the US. Famous for his reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times and his TV show with Gene Siskel, in recent years, Ebert has won new prominence as a blogger. 

Since losing the ability to speak following surgery for thyroid cancer in 2006, Ebert has used the internet to create an alternative conversation. At the centre of a vast community of readers, Ebert reveals the positive possibilities of an intimate engagement between writers and readers. Roger Ebert's Journal has become an extraordinary locus for online debate, with comment threads that represent the flipside of those found on YouTube or IMDB.  

Intimate, honest and confessional, this blog demonstrates that intelligent reflection and the internet need not be mutually exclusive. Writing about music, movies, politics, culture, science, and, with notable insight and sensitivity, illness and the fundamental reality of human loneliness, Ebert's treatment of the subject in hand is always elegant and good humoured. It is his absence of vanity, above all, which lends his writing its special quality. 

Earlier this year, Roger Ebert won the Webby Person of the Year Award. No doubt the writer's many readers are still cheering. The great critic proves that we still value people who have earned their right to a public voice, we still find that we need to test our ideas and opinions against theirs.