Will It Pay?

            It may seem incredibly obvious but I will fess up in public anyway. I am no technophile.  I am not on Facebook.  I do not Tweet.  I have accepted a couple of friends’ invitations to join their networks on Linked In but I don’t know what I can contribute.  I am basically technologically illiterate.  However, as a former broadcast and print journalist, I am very aware of how difficult it is for many members of the media, particularly the print media, such as newspapers, magazines and various blogs, to achieve financial success.  To do my part I am considering, merely considering, erecting a “pay wall” between you dear reader and my blog.  To do your part I need you dear reader to feedback suggestions, ideas, and approaches for me to make this happen.  Unless you think it’s a bad idea.

            As recently reported in the New York Times a study has found that consumers have been willing to spend for information on the Internet, although the sums spent are relatively low.

Nearly two-thirds of users have paid for content online, according to a telephone survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of those, roughly half have spent money on music and half on software, the two most popular types of material bought. But the amount spent was typically only about $10 a month, Pew said.  My writing is more entertaining, scintillating and valuable than music and software so I would expect support for my idea of establishing a pay wall. Not that I would contemplate making it a very high wall.  But as I said, I need your feedback on whether or not I should begin construction of the pay wall. Of course if you want to send me a lump sum payment of consequence I will forgo any further thought of a pay wall.

Here are a couple of samples of what you might miss if my writing takes refuge behind a pay wall.

Cable TV’s Travel Channel airs a regular feature called Food Paradise in which the cameras travel across America searching out the best places to indulge in various categories such as big breakfasts, pig-out buffets and so forth.  Recently the show featured two wonderful, if unhealthy, themes, Bacon Paradise and Crispy Fried Food Paradise. Each tasty segment was punctuated by commercials for Nutrisystems new diet menus.

A TV Commercial for Dr. Pepper, done well before the NFL season got rolling, has Michael Strahan putting a butt-whipping tackle on Donovan McNabb to whom he’s just handed a delivery pizza in the foyer of Donovan’s home.  Donovan goes flying, into furniture, and winds up flat on his back, kind of the way he wound up at the end of this season with the Washington Redskins. Bad news for Donovan but very good news, I think, for whoever conceived the commercial.

My Father was born and grew up on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side of New York City's Manhattan and now...as noted in the New York Times,

"At Sheng Wang on Eldridge Street, the Fujianese chef JinSheng Zhu makes dao xiao mian, “knife-peeled” noodles with ruffled edges that he rapidly slices off a dough block with a steel blade the size of his fist. Huacan Chen is an aspiring entrepreneur from Fuzhou in southern China, with a skill that happens to be seriously marketable in New York at the moment: he knows how to spin out endless skeins of la mian, smooth, springy hand-stretched noodles, using nothing but a countertop and his hands."

In the great Sergio Leone movie Once Upon A Time in America, set on the Lower East Side, Robert DeNiro plays a character named Noodles. 

It goes around.  It comes around.