Development of Media

From print to online journalism

As elsewhere, Indonesian newspapers are struggling to find ways to combine internet and print so they reinforce each other. But journalists have little experience of working in a multimedia world, or its demands. RNTC developed a tailor-made course to meet the needs of these journalists. 16 Indonesian journalists participated in these thee weeks course in Hilversum.

“Indonesian media don’t have much experience with multimedia as internet connections here are still slow, and multimedia newsrooms are a new phenomenon,” says 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 problem is that we are not yet ready to confront the challenges because we lack expertise in running media convergence platforms.”

The three week course took place in November 2009 and was financed by StuNed Indonesia (a program by Nuffic-Neso Indonesia). It proved an eye-opener for the 16 regional and national newspaper journalists. They learned the principles of online and multimedia journalism, produced their own multimedia content and visited a number of multimedia newsrooms in the Netherlands.

During the last week of the course, eight of the sixteen journalists visited Dutch newspapers (Telegraaf, Volkskrant, Stentor en PZC) for some real life examples. This part was organized by FreeVoice, partner of RNTC. In 2010, journalists from these newspapers will visit their colleagues in Indonesia.

More information:

* Contact RNTC: info@rntc.nl

* Jakarta Post

* Stuned

* Freevoice