Christopher Byron, a business columnist at The New York Post today blasted Dow Jones management for its purchase of MarketWatch.com for over $500 million (Byron also blasted Dow Jones for several other electronic publishing deals from previous years).

Byron might have a point about Telerate and some of the other deals made by Dow Jones, but he misses a major point in his criticism. Dow Jones never should have had to purchase MarketWatch. The mistake was going the subscription only route with wsj.com in the late 1990s. That was when Dow Jones gave away its chance of having one of the largest if not the largest of online business communities. Using a combination of paid and free areas in and around The Wall Street Journal online would have been unbeatable.

And this mistake forced Dow Jones into having to borrow money to get back into the eyeball game in the Internet business community.

The next chapter is to see if DJ messes up MarketWatch or really makes it grow. The competition is fierce in the online business arena. Time will tell.