True Blood: WSJ publisher calls Google a "digital vampire" with "fangs," "sucking blood" out of publishing biz

In a recent discussion of why his newspaper business is failing, Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton called Google a 'digital vampire." Presumably, this makes the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications zombies, because their antiquated business models amount to a dead man walking.

Snip:

"[Google] 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."

By offering its content free on the Web, the newspaper industry "gave Google's fangs a great place to bite," he continued. "We will never know what might have happened had newspapers taken a different approach."

Boy I'm gonna be pissed if this is just another stealth marketing campaign for True Blood.

WSJ publisher calls Google "Digital Vampire" (Crains NY, via Siva V.)

• [gollux]

  How does it feel to be spanked by “the invisible hand that guides the market”. Especially when Alan Greenspan gave the great Mea Culpa about how he was disappointed because he thought “that everyone would work for their own best interests” and thereby avoid all the meltdowns we’ve been witnessing of late.

  WSJ played at being a major blood sucker on everyone over the last decade, they’re just trying to draw attention away from the role they played in the economic collapse.

  Slightly OT, but we could have survived the collapse of an outmoded news distribution network. The financial sector is another matter alltogether.

• [Anonymous]

  if they hate google leeching so much: robots.txt

• [Avram / Moderator]

  Roy @8, are you saying that the WSJ‘s far-right editorial stance didn’t get tedious?

• [Pantograph]

  Oh well. In a functioning ecology the predators tend to take the sick and dying first.

• [Pantograph]

  Oh well. In a functioning ecology the predators tend to take the sick and dying first.

• [dero]

  Hey, as the (original) home of News Corporation’s empire, can a South Australian just point out that most of News Corps Australian papers are simply aggregators of AP and Reuters wires anyway?

• [Anonymous]

  I’m confused by this argument. Google News just collects headlines and maybe the first sentence. Then you click on the link and takes you TO THE ORIGINAL WEBSITE, like wsj.com, where you view THEIR advertising. I’m going to a news website that I would never go to if Google hadn’t directed me there. It seems like Google is helping, not hurting. What am I missing??????

• [DWittSF]

  This is rich coming from one of Rupert Murdoch’s minions.
  As if gutting media ownership requirements to create an empire of right-wing stupidity was a brilliant defense of publishing.

• [CT Moore]

  If Google is a vampire, I guess I’m a fang-banger, and so it everyone of Murdoch’s readers. They should deal with it…

• [jjasper]

  Poor NewsCorp. Billions and billions of dollars, and a luddite at the helm.

• [bjacques]

  It’s the Invisible Hand of the market at work! What’s their beef?

  Oh, wait, the WSJ are working on a paywalled news aggregator similar to what Google does for free. Typical capitalist cheerleader; all for competition except when someone’s competing against them, and winning.

  Laughter, ridicule and a trip to the House of Pain!

• [automaton_be]

  A forced analogy does not a truth make.

• [Anonymous]

  right.
  because Google Scholar, which links to pay-sites, work so bad, that nobody uses it.
  pffftt.

• [firetheft]

  I am incredibly tired of the feigned culpability of the old media, as exemplified by “The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

  They make the disingenuous argument that their real error was giving too much away, like a parent giving their child too much candy, all to support turning back the clock and erecting pay walls.

  They also somehow slip in the idea that old media are the ones who really deserve credit for Google and others’ success.

• [Roy Trumbull]

  Even pre-Murdock the WSJ was pretty worthless. They always had very good highly edited feature articles. The WSJ was pushed onto students by biz profs. After subscribing to it for years I found as an investment information source it just didn’t have it.
  Moody’s would have some good pieces from time to time but then they thoroughly dumbed it down and I dropped my subscription.
  Investor’s Business Daily was better for showing you where the money was going but their far right editorial policy got quickly tedious. There’s good and bad pols on both sides of the aisle. Yet they ranted on like Rush.