Problem solved. Crisis averted. Revenue has finally begun to flow to Internet news sites directly from the heretofore freeloading public. Those of us who feared this day would never come can drink a glass of warm milk and get some sleep.

Kachinglers (of which I’m now one) agree to pay a flat fee of $5 a month that will be distributed among the Kachingling Web sites we favor. To support one of these sites we click on its Kachingle medallion, and from then on, every time we go to that site it keeps score. At the end of the month our $5 will be divvied up in proportion to our visits to the Kachingle sites where we’ve signed on. Decided you no longer like the site? Turn it off. That’s it. No paywalls, no tedious registration at multiple sites, no buyer’s remorse over paying for access to a site that turns out not to have what you wanted. You sign up once, put your credit card number on file (via PayPal), and get to surfing.

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Joe Eyre, her marketing director, is on the line with us. Here he speaks up, saying the vice presidents for interactive development at the big papers are open-minded, but “the guys in the executive suites are still old guys in gray suits used to producing news and just shoving it out. It’ll take a little time for the guys in the upper offices to move on and for fresher thinking to allow for a more open model.”

Typaldos wants the Reader to Kachingle, of course, so she asks about our relationship with the mayor of Chicago. Leading our roster of prestigious Kachinglers with the name of Mayor Daley, she says, would send the public a powerful message.

You may be familiar with a site called Kickstarter, where people with aspirations they can’t afford solicit money from strangers who believe in what they want to do. When all goes well the aspirants wind up with not only the funds they need but a community behind their cause. For instance, cartoonist Ted Rall is now raising money on Kickstarter to go to Afghanistan and write a book. “He’s raising $25,000 and he’s already at $20,000,” Typaldos tells me. She calls it crowdfunding, “where individuals fund things that are important to them.”

“It’s not just that you can show other people that you’re donating to our organization,” he says, “but it’s a way of telling people, ‘Hopefully, you’ll do the same as well. I happen to think this organization is worth supporting. Hopefully, you’ll take a look at it.’ Social media has the power to spread this message to a lot of people in a short amount of time, Facebook and Twitter being the two primary platforms for that.