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Despite a flourishing of online news sites and portals, established newspapers remain the medium of choice for most Indonesians to get their news, a new survey has found.

Irawati Pratignyo, managing director of media at Nielsen Indonesia, said on Thursday that although newspaper circulation had steadily declined since 2007, newspapers were maintaining and even boosting their readership through their online versions, either in the form of Web sites or e-papers.

The finding was based on a survey carried out by Nielsen in the third quarter of the year among 47.028 million individuals in nine cities nationwide with access to a television.

The survey found that during the same period in 2007, 23 percent of that same group read a newspaper.

In 2008, that figure dropped to 22 percent, then 18 percent in 2009, 15 percent last year and 14 percent this year.

“This doesn’t mean there is no longer a market for traditional newspapers,” Irawati said. “The market is still there, it’s just that the format has changed.”

She said the new generation of readers preferred to get their news in online form, in much the same way they depend on the Internet for most of their other sources of information.

“Younger readers have different reading habits from older ones. They read e-papers, which is why print media publications must change their business model by moving their media content online,” Irawati said.

She also said there would likely be little resistance to media companies here adopting paywalls to make readers purchase subscriptions for access to online content.

“For loyal readers, paying a subscription for access to online content won’t be a problem,” she said.

The issue of paywalls, however, is a contentious one, with critics questioning the point of restricting access to content that may well be widely available for free on the Internet.

Irawati said it was inevitable that publications would have to make the transition from print media to online media, given the growing number of Indonesians with access to the Internet, particularly through Web-enabled cellular phones.

The proportion of cellphone users in the country doubled from 30 percent in 2007 to 60 percent this year, while the proportion of people with access to the Internet jumped from 12 percent to 28 percent in the same period.

Irawati said 22 percent of middle-income Indonesians had access to the Internet and spent an average of one and a half hours a day surfing the Web.

“The growth in the number of consumers with Internet access continues to increase each quarter, and could even grow faster if the infrastructure was in place to support it,” she said.