Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency Mr. Ebert in 2010 at the Webby Awards in New York.Throughout his career Roger Ebert, who died on Thursday, continued to embrace new ways of expressing himself.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who started off in newspapers, he made the transition to television in 1975 with the program that grew into “At the Movies,†the long-running syndicated television program with his fellow critic Gene Siskel, which made both men into household names. And when the Internet started to raise questions about the future viability of newspapers as a business, Mr. Ebert charged forth into the digital void with well-received blog posts (even if he didn’t make a lot of money from them). He even excelled at writing captions for the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon contest.
But late in his life, when he could no longer use his own voice, a result of his struggle with cancer, Mr. Ebert reinforced his place as a major cultural force with a strong presence on Twitter, where over 800,000 users of the service subscribed to his broad array of updates. Mr. Ebert used Twitter to hold forth on topics well beyond movies, and explained his embrace of the format in this way:
I don’t make any claims for Twitter. It suits my circumstances. It can occupy way too much time. But there’s something seductive about it: The stream, the flow, the chatter, the sudden bursts of news, the snark, the gossip, time itself tweet-tweet-tweeting away.
The power of his brand on Twitter wasn’t simply based on numbers. Rather, the avidity and engagement of the audience who followed Mr. Ebert were in part what made his social media presence so powerful. So it came as no surprise when some of Mr. Ebert’s peers in film criticism and colleagues in movie journalism took to Twitter to remember him following his death with the kind of rapid-fire responses at which Mr. Ebert himself excelled. Here is a selection of some of those tweets:
And Bilge Ebiri at New York magazine identified a potential legacy in Mr. Ebert’s work:
