Vampires are all the rage these days. There’s the teen flick and book series Twilight, etc. and the HBO series True Blood. That vampire zeitgeist must partly explain the use of the blood sucking metaphor by Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton to describe Google’s relationship with newspapers.
According to Crain’s Hinton said the following:
“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[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.”
“Taste for blood . . ” Perhaps we should call Mr. Hinton the newspaper industry’s Van Helsing to Google’s Dracula.
One can almost hear the Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff accents coming out now . . .
Screenwerk 
July 24, 2009 at 12:44 pm
[…] of which are not. I’m a newspaper fan and supporter but the newspapers have unfortunately leveled charges against companies like Google, which distract from their own failure of vision and execution in the […]