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58 commentsFriday, June 26, 2009

Dow Jones Exec Describes Google As "Digital Vampire"

Identifies newspaper industry as victim

Given how everyone seems to love HBO's "True Blood" and a certain series of books by Stephenie Meyer, it might, at first listen, have been possible to imagine that a Dow Jones exec gave Google a compliment yesterday.  The man wasn't being overly nice when he compared Google to a "digital vampire," though. 

Google Logo

According to Matthew Flamm, Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton began, "There is a charitable view of the history of Google."  He then continued, "[It] didn't actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se.  The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google's taste for this kind of blood."

But in any event, Hinton believes that the end result equates to Google "sucking the blood" out of the newspaper industry, which isn't the most pleasant possible image.

Dow Jones does own the Wall Street Journal, by the way, which explains Hinton's interest.

And if it matters, Hinton gave a vague reference to a possible solution instead of spinning metaphors about the problem.  "Dow Jones is just at the end of developing a new platform from which to conduct business on the Web," he said.

News Tags: Google, newspapers, Dow Jones
About the author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

So what, the newspaper

So what, the newspaper industry shouldn't have competition?

Google should avoid a certain line of business, cos someone might get upset?

sorry, if google do it better, cheaper, and more people want it that way, then newspapers need to evolve or die....
thats how it works....
thats how EVERYTHING works...

or didn't they learn that along with "freedom of the press" line?

B Parker flawed analysis

I don't think competition is the issue. The issue is that Google isn't generating this content (no reporters, no Google news site of its own content). If all the online news ventures disappeared there wouldn't be a Google news service. Hence the vampire references.
It is more like a cheap startup simply photocopying pages from a number of newpapers and giving them away under its own banner. Would you then be saying that the newpapers shouldn't have competion from this rip-off outfit?
I'm not saying that Google shouldn't have a news service, but that your analysis is flawed.
Google appears to allow news sites to opt-out from having their articles being indexed and displayed on the Google news site, so the Wall Street Journal could stop its articles from being displayed on Google if it really wanted to.

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