Finance Matters

The richest man in the United States is just like us — a blogger, with his own site.

Bill Gates rolled out Gates Notes today, a site he says he’ll use to share conversations he’s had with interesting people around the world.

Now we know why Bill Gates started a Twitter account yesterday — he wanted to promote his website, just like the rest of the pople on Twitter.

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• Bill Gates Joins Twitter, Says Hi To Ryan Seacrest
• Bill Gates’s Amazing — Yet Terrible — Call On Kodak
• It Costs $35,000 To Tour Bill Gates’s Home

Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee (which is the committee that has the lead on all this AIG stuff) sent an angry letter to his counterpart Congressman Edolphus Towns, complaining about intransigence and footdragging at the New York Fed.

The essence here is that the New York Fed should be in contempt of Congressional subpoena for not having given forth enough documents related to AIG

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• Now Bernanke Welcomes "Full Review" Of The AIG Bailout
• Now Hank Paulson Is Being Called To Testify On AIG
• Geithner: It Was "Absolutely" The Right Decision To Pay Out AIG Obligations At 100 Cents On The Dollar

NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller, the New York Times‘ former senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com from 2006 to 2008, thinks the Times‘ new plan for a metered paywall system is a worthwhile experiment. But she doesn’t plan on going down that road with NPR.

“I think it’s a really worthy experminent and I wish them great success with it,” she wrote us in an email. “Much less risky and ‘exclusive’ than walling off part of their content on first entry (which was the TimesSelect model).”

TimesSelect, a two-year experiment that ended in September 2007, charged NYTimes.com users $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for access to Times columnists and the newspaper’s archives.

“The whole industry will be watching to see how that works and whether they should follow suit…except NPR,” Schiller continued. “Our very successful pay model (300mm+ a year across NPR and NPR member stations) is voluntarily and will remain thus.”

While Schiller was at the Times, she led the team responsible for NYTimes.com’s Web overhaul. She also dismantled TimesSelect to take an advantage of ad revenue from booming traffic stats.

Schiller wrote a letter to TimesSelect members, announcing the end of the experiment in 2007:

Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion – as well as share it, link to it and comment on it.

Since Schiller left the Times, she reinvented NPR’s digital presence. She also has been a strong advocate for keeping newspaper content free.

In an interview with Newsweek last July, Schiller said talk of charging for news online is “mass delusion.”

I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It’s almost like there’s mass delusion going on in the industry—They’re saying we really really need it, that we didn’t put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let’s do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn’t work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we’re all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I’m sorry to say.

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• NPR Asks Facebook For Interview Sources
• New York Times Paywall In 2011 Is Too Little, Too Late
• New York Times Announces Metered Pay Model Coming in January 2011

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Billionaire investor Warren Buffett says he’s still not sure when the economy will recover, but he expects the rebound to be slow because American consumers remain uneasy.

Buffett said Wednesday that he thinks the key to economic recovery will be getting money back into most people’s pockets. He says the government’s first stimulus plan didn’t do that very well.

Buffett says the economic hangover the country is experiencing now is directly proportional to the size of the financial binge in previous years.

Buffett spoke to The Associated Press Wednesday before shareholders in his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., met to approve a 50-for-1 split of the company’s Class B shares.

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• Read The Crankiest Interview Warren Buffett Has Ever Given
• Warren Buffett: We Need 13-Year Olds To Start Cohabitating To Clean Up The Housing Overhang
• Buffett: We’re Not Hiring New People Because Our Order Book Still Sucks