That Esquire article is very good. Mention is made of a Scottish company developing text-to-speech computer software: Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don't all have to sound like Stephen Hawking. They have catalog voices — Heather, Katherine, Sarah, and Sue — with regional Scottish accents, but they will also custom-build software for clients who had the foresight to record their voices at length before they lost them. Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital audio. The average English-speaking person will use about two thousand different words over the course of a given day. CereProc is mining Ebert's TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won't sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does.
latimes.com article: Roger Ebert takes to Twitter to give tea party followers a thumb's down. The film reviewer is aiming barbs at Sarah Palin and other conservatives.
Who's the biggest scourge of the tea party movement these days? It might be film critic Roger Ebert, who lately has been tossing brickbats at Sarah Palin and other right-wing politicians in between rendering verdicts on the latest movies. Over the last few weeks, Ebert has used his busy Twitter page to give the tea party belittling nicknames, predict it will quickly fade and opine that "a loud movement is not the same as a mass movement. I write about the TeePees because it's so sad how they've been manipulated to oppose their own best interests," Ebert said in an e-mail, using his latest epithet for the tea party followers. "I am a liberal."
Well said.
His thoughts have earned him scorn from conservatives who accuse him of elitism and trashing ordinary Americans. More notable than the political spat, though, is what it says about the rapidly evolving media and Ebert's place among them. Because of his decades of TV appearances, including with his late partner Gene Siskel, Ebert is perhaps the only critic in America who really has a household name.
But due to complications from cancer surgery in 2006, he has been unable to speak. The story of his recovery battle, along with a jarring portrait that revealed his surgically ravaged jawline, recently appeared in Esquire. Tuesday, he will appear on a taped piece on "Oprah" to unveil an electronic device that promises to give him back some vocal function. Given the fact that for years Ebert was never far away from a microphone, there's irony in the fact that his current battle with the tea party followers is conducted in text only, with bite-sized tweets and blog posts.
Now the 67-year-old reviewer finds himself at the center of the debate over whether and how mainstream journalists -- who have typically labored in silos of specialization and avoided anything that called into question a pose of objectivity -- should mix it up in the woolly world of social media. Many large news-gathering organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, have rules governing reporters' and editors' use of Facebook, Twitter and other applications. Some experts say the time may be ripe to rethink such restrictions.
"In an era in which newspapers are in decline, any journalist who attracts attention in any area should be welcome," said Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University who is also an active Twitter user. "Distinctions that keep reporters penned into a small area never made much sense. The greatest journalists and writers were always Renaissance men and women, able to do many tasks."
Andrew Breitbart, publisher of several influential conservative blogs including Big Hollywood, defends Ebert the new-media user while attacking Ebert the political thinker. Breitbart says that Ebert's Twitter posts reveal a patronizing view of tea party adherents that serves as a "caricature of the liberal mind-set" and that the critic brims with "raw contempt for Middle America."
As opposed to patronizing Middle America? Whilst I admire Breitbart for being able to make the distinction, his views can hardly be considered middle america: he's a conservative elite, contrasted to Ebert being a liberal elite.
... Breitbart adds that the current fracas ultimately proves how much power has tilted to new media and away from mainstream outlets such as newspapers, where Ebert has reviewed movies for more than 40 years. "I am a proponent of Roger Ebert using Twitter to express his point of view," Breitbart said. "It's a testament to the new media. Where is he having a bigger impact, in the Twitterverse or doing his reviews of movies?"
Ebert admits he was slow to appreciate Twitter but is now a fan. "It's an art form," he said in an e-mail interview with The Times. "It encourages minimalism, almost like a word game. "Having said more than once 'I will never be a twit,' I now feel it is a splendid discipline . . . I link to great writing on the web. I also like to link to the unique, the beautiful, the weird. "That day is a sad day," he said, "when a newspaperman fears to tweet."
Both recognize the power of new technology, its impact. But, those who don't tweet, or know what tweeting is, what about them?
The Chris Jones article in Esquire.
• My Esquire interview with Lee F---ing Marvin..
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The New York Times review of Chris Jones's "Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space," by Janet Maslin.
Photos: Roger Ebert through the years
Rosenthal: Ebert introduces The Ebert Club
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