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Wall Street Journal Bleeds and Blames the Vampire Google

In 2007 I subtitled my Google Version 2.0 “the calculating predator.” The Wall Street Journal apparently found that metaphor too tame, preferring the more Ivy League “vampire” as the appropriate figure of speech. The argument in “WSJ Publisher Calls Google ‘Digital Vampire’ is a rehash of woulda, coulda, shoulda. What is different is the escalation of rhetoric. I used the word predator to emphasize Google’s patience and its knack for waiting for weaker food to wander into its territory. Vampire is in step with the pop trend of mysterious creatures who come out at night to suck the blood of their hapless victims. According to some novelists, the victims of a vampire fall in love with the beasts and willingly expose their soft, blood charged necks to the vampire’s incisors. Maybe vampire is a better metaphor. In my opinion, the victims either ignored the overtures of the Google or ignored the beastie for a decade or so. Now that the “surround and seep” strategy has become too big to ignore, the victims are wailing.

Matthew Flamm wrote:

Dow Jones is just at the end of developing a new platform from which to conduct business on the Web … Imagine this future: the Journal is one of the many newspapers you might buy in one place and with one payment… Watch for it. (The person quoted was Les Hinton.)

Excuse me, I don’t need to imagine this one stop shop. That’s what I have with my Overflight service. When that is not available to me, I have my trusty Chrome equipped with a container sucking info from hither and yon.

I am an addled goose, but I think Dow Jones has been struggling to make electronic information pay for a long time. I recall testing a version of Dow Jones’s desktop software in the late 1980s. Mistake after error took place until the Journal managed to find a formula that stemmed its losses, but the revenue is not likely to pay back the investment in the many tries the company made before it hit a single. Not only has Dow Jones tried to create a global news system in its Factiva unit, the company had to pull that entity back into the company because it was gasping for air. I heard that another high tech content processing unit of the company was on the ropes. The reason is that the methods and technologies of these initiatives were expensive, clunky, and tough to sell.

Like the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal has not attracted an audience that tops the Web traffic charts. I am a subscriber to the WSJ print edition and find the online edition too annoying to use. The WSJ has managed to equal the level of annoyance engendered for me in the online New York Times. So that is an achievement in my narrow view. The newspapers are too big to fail. Where have I heard that before. Other challenges include:

1. News magazines like Time and Newsweek are in a tactical shift now horning in on the analysis territory that characterizes the features in the Wall Street Journal but these shifts have done little to blunt the shift to crunch news and analysis found easily on the Web
2. The brutal costs inflicted by printing, shipping, and distributing hard copies are not going to be easily contained and online revenues are not likely to cover the cash needs of the online business and the revenue short fall in the traditional news paper business
3. Google is only one player that is sucking oxygen, not blood, from the newspaper industry. Google is an easy target because it is lousy at PR, an exemplar of the new business models for some online companies, and rolling in dough that newspapers want to get for themselves.

In an effort to control essentially feature stories that could sit on a shelf for weeks and commoditized stock and bond tables, the Wall Street Journal convinced itself that it was a destination site that would pull a Web scale user base. Wrong. High traffic Web sites are not like the Wall Street Journal’s approach to online information. Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal knows best. Unfortunately the revenue and business model have not gotten the message. Note: the Financial Times has followed a similar path so do not get the idea that this commentary is limited to the Wall Street Journal.

I like it when the old dinosaurs roar against the night sky as the snowflakes fall. I suppose the children of these newspaper executives fully embrace their parents’ views about online information. I wonder where the WSJ execs’ children obtained news and videos about celebrity deaths? I wonder how the kids found the info? I would wager one gallon of Harrod’s Creek pond water that the progeny used other services and never gave a thought to the Wall Street Journal.

Stephen Arnold, June 26, 2009

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