A Twitter user catching up on the news at his office in Jakarta on Thursday. More younger Indonesians rely on a combination of new and conventional media as a way to get their information. (JG Photo/Jurnasyanto Sukarno)
Syifa Merdekawati has her own recipe for getting the news: Take a couple hours of television viewing, add in a steady stream of Twitter feeds from news portals and top it off with several hours of poring over newspapers on the weekend.
For the 20-year-old university student, Twitter is the medium of choice when it comes to getting instant news updates.
“I watch television occasionally, depending on my schedule,” she said. “Nowadays I only get to watch TV for two hours in the evening because I’m interning.”
But despite getting much of her daily news fix from digital platforms, Syifa says she still turns to newspapers to get a broader perspective on stories.
“The good thing about newspapers is that they give more detailed and complete information,” she says, adding that she tends to look out for stories on social and cultural issues that interest her.
“For instance, I’ve been following the debate over censoring [Internet] pornography and on the development of batik, because I’m interested in those issues. I don’t follow political or corruption stories. It’s not that I think they’re irrelevant, it’s just that I’m not into them.”
Syifa’s reliance on a combination of new and old media appears to be a growing trend among younger Indonesians, despite reports of shifting global trends toward exclusive consumption of new media for the younger generation, says Lita Natanagara, a business director for McCann Worldgroup Indonesia, a marketing communications company.
She points out that younger Indonesians have not abandoned print and other conventional media the way that their peers in the West have done. She says even if there is a decline in the consumption of conventional media by the younger generation, it is not very significant and is only apparent in some major urban centers.
“What the young people consume through digital platforms still serves to complement what they consume through conventional ones,” Lita says. “It rounds out the information they already have.”
Similar trends elsewhere have prompted traditional media outlets to adapt. Radio Australia, for instance, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s international radio and online service, has expanded its outreach by making its content available on mobile and digital platforms.
Mike McCluskey, the chief executive of Radio Australia, says that despite having a loyal audience in the 40-and-up demographic, the company recognizes the need to make its programs appealing to younger audiences amid changing demographics.
“Our [older] audience is still there and people at that age still tune in to our content,” he says. “[It’s said] the older audience is dying out, but not yet.”
McCluskey says Radio Australia’s programing appeals more to older people because much of what it puts out is serious, talk-based content, while the younger audience is more focused on entertainment and lifestyle.
“We do have to make content that appeals to younger audiences as well. You can’t rely just on the older demographic listening to traditional media forms,” he says. “This is one reason why we’re making our media content available in digital online and mobile platforms.”
McCluskey, who has been in radio for 28 years, says that while the trend may be shifting, people still have a tendency to become more interested in serious, talk-based content as they get older.
“I think one of the challenges is to maintain that high quality and news-focused content and to engage younger people by trying to make news and talk-based content more relevant and more stimulating, more interesting and dealing with issues that matter to younger people,” he says.
Maika Randini, a spokeswoman for media research firm Nielsen Indonesia, says 97 percent of Indonesians in the 10-29 age band still watch television, but fewer are reading newspapers or listening to radio compared to 2009.
“On the contrary, there’s been a significant increase during the past year in the use of the Internet for this age group, from 29 percent to 41 percent,” she says.
Most of the younger generation, or 57 percent, read no more than two editions of a newspaper each week, she adds, while 16 percent access the Internet multiple times in a week and 11 percent do so on a daily basis.
McCluskey predicts new media will become the mainstay of how news is delivered, just as television is now.
“Fifty years ago when television was beginning, we would have seen it as new media. Now we call it traditional media,” he says. “Mobile, digital and computer-based media will be traditional media in the future. We have to have our content there now, so people who are using this new media at the moment [can] grow up with it and continue to use it as time moves forward.”
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