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round the world, the convergence of technologies at increasing speeds is hastening the evolution of different media. As users, we’re constantly changing, trading old gadgets for new. As marketers, we’re adapting to those changes. But it’s important to take a reality check periodically. Otherwise, hype could overwhelm reality.

It’s no longer a question of “if” newspapers are going to fade away, it’s just a question of “when”. This is true even in some developing countries like India, where news-on-paper is still growing as millions more join the middle class each year. Those markets will go through the same cycle in their own time, and arrive at the same finish in the end. The reason is simple. News is news only when it’s fresh, otherwise it’s old. News is being delivered instantly now, as it happens, on your screen. For many of us, life now revolves around three screens: big on the wall, medium on the table and small in our pockets. In time, the world’s have-nots will get there too as costs come down, speeds go up and more people come out of poverty. Slow as it is, that process of human evolution has begun and there’s no stopping it.

But there will always be room for opinion, after the headlines have been heard. Television has embraced this truth, which is why talk-shows get almost as much airtime as the news even on 24-hour news channels. In that sense, newspapers will have to become more like our magazines of today, with opinions and analysis. What will then become of magazines, tomorrow? Call them what you will, but regardless of their look and feel, they are destined to become one and the same thing in due course. Paper as a format will continue to lose ground to the screen, but there is still some life left in it. I say this because many of our young, not just the old, still love the feel of paper. The evidence lies not just in the millions of text-books printed each year but also in the fact that the book publishing industry continues to flourish. True, e-books are growing in market share but paper books are far from dying. This is true for both fiction and non-fiction. The rate of decline is difficult to predict, but it may be appropriate to remember that TV didn’t kill either radio or cinema. Slowed them down, but didn’t kill them. They all have their place under the sun, even today.

Undoubtedly, the Internet is going to remain the flavor of the decade, for many decades to come. That’s where the action is, that’s where all the innovation is focussed. In the not-too-distant future the reality of convergence will make all moving pictures and sound, whether TV or Internet sourced, one and the same thing. In many countries, Internet TV is already a reality now. Owners of television channels are alive to that reality. Collectively, they still have more eyeballs on their content every day competing with the limitless world of the Internet. But they know better than to allow telecommunication networks with pay-TV arms to swallow them up. Whether it is news or entertainment, television will continue to dominate media regardless of the technology that delivers it to our screens. That’s where the much of the advertising budget goes today and that’s unlikely to vanish tomorrow. Too much is being made of Facebook and Twitter, global behemoths that have yet to produce consistent success for marketers or a decent balance-sheet for themselves at year-end. In Indonesia, the ground realities are rather different than they are in the West today. TV dominates, both in terms of eyeballs as well as advertising spends.

Just about everybody watches TV, every week if not every day. Nothing else compares. Radio is next, with regular listeners averaging 30 percent of the population 14 years of age and older. Contrary to what some researchers may say, newspapers come next in the rankings, still attracting 26 percent of that population each week. Because they are concentrated on 10-18 cities, those surveys distort the truth that prevails across all of urban Indonesia, let alone the whole country. The numbers of people accessing the Internet is indeed growing rapidly, thanks to the low-cost portable connections being made available by just about all the cellular networks. But the collective 22 percent of people accessing the Internet at least monthly is still smaller than the 26 percent reading a newspaper each week. Also growing rapidly are people accessing the Internet via their mobile phones, now at 9 percent. While online readership is growing, is unlikely many read long articles from kompas.com on a handset. The news for tabloids, magazines and cinema isn’t getting better. They have all hit single-digit plateaus, but they haven’t disappeared. These are the numbers.

But if we compare apples to apples from a marketing perspective, the quality of impact of a giant billboard on main street can hardly be equal to that of a tiny “billboard” on a computer screen. The medium is still the message, the context will always be an influence. The TV screen will always have a magic of its own, a newspaper still has a certain gravitas and the power of a 30-second commercial on a big screen isn’t going to diminish. They may become 3D, or even holograms one day, but they will always pack a punch. These are basic lessons that seem to get buried in all the hype, all too often.

My opinions are influenced by Roy Morgan Single Source, the country’s largest syndicated survey. More than 26,000 respondents are interviewed every year, week after week. The data is projected to reflect 87 percent of the population 14 years of age and over.