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.
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.
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