We've have been getting used to newspapers complaining about losing classified advertising revenues to online competitors. But to hear a publisher name "the 'Googles,' 'eBays,' and 'Yahoo!s' of this world" as the main competitors of traditional media in the content area is fairly unusual still.
But that is just what
Horst Pirker did, since autumn 2004 the president of the Austrian newspaper publishers association,
Verband Österreichischer Zeitungen (VÖZ). While presenting his association's new yearbook yesterday, he said that in his view the borders between journalists and readers blur, and "the biggest 'content generators' in the future will not be media companies, but their former readers."
He compared the competition between search engines and traditional media to a chess match between man and machine: The game is on. (
Der Standard has his speech, in German.)
