The testy relationship between the newspaper industry and the world's largest search engine has been ratcheted another notch. The publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Les Hinton, says Google is "sucking the blood" out of the newspaper business and promises technology to address it.
Hinton, chief executive at Dow Jones, says making content free "gave Google's fangs a great place to bite." He told a conference we'll never know what might have happened if newspaper publishers hadn't gone that route.
But he says Dow Jones is in the final stage of technical development of a platform that will earn permit newspapers to earn revenue from online users.
When Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought Dow Jones, one expected result (of many) was that the Wall Street Journal 's subscriber-supported online model was going to be liberated to become a free service. |