Indonesian newspapers face falling sales and declining ad revenues. And by 2014, the Indonesian government will have deployed some 3,000 kilometres of optical fibre cable in the major Indonesian cities. This will increase the speed and availability of internet significantly. Bad news if you are a newspaper publisher – or simply a newspaper journalist.
As elsewhere, Indonesian newspapers are struggling to find ways to combine internet and print so they reinforce each other. But journalists in Indonesia, as in many other developing countries, have little experience of working in a multimedia world, or its demands. In 2009, RNTC gave a helping hand by offering a tailor-made “From print to online media” course for journalists from across Indonesia. 
A’an Suryana, of The Jakarta Post, who helped set up the course as well as taking part in it: “Internet threatens the existence of the newspaper industry, and media organizations have seen that media convergence may be the correct answer to prevent them from going extinct.”
The two week course, financed by StuNed Indonesia, proved an eye-opener for the 16 regional and national newspaper journalists. Among the issues covered were the use of internet for research and publication, running a multimedia newsroom, writing and producing audiovisual material for internet, and new forms of interaction with readers and audiences. It also examined changing newspaper business models at national, regional and local levels.
Tony Wilkinson, of RNTC: “The traditional, clear-cut divisions between text, graphics, audio and video have blurred. Journalists are turning into a new species, ‘content providers’, able to generate material for each of the different media. Then there are the practicalities of multimedia journalism – packaging and presenting information differently requires new organisational structures for production, publication and distribution. As of yet, there is no universal business model for a content provider or a multimedia organisation.”
Or as one participant put it afterwards: “I came here purely as a print journalist – now I am going back a multimedia journalist.”
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