Progress & Development | The Jakarta Post (original) (raw)

Since its conception in 1983, the Post has developed into a prestigious newspaper respected for its independent views and bold coverage of various national and international events.

The number of its subscribers have also increased, from 8,657 in 1983, to 41,049 in December 1998.

To keep up with its reputation as an independent newspaper and to satisfy the demands of its readers for fast but accurate news and sharp analyses, the newspaper's editorial and business departments started in 1990 a routine recruitment program. Each year the newspaper recruits new journalists and marketing and advertising staff to meet its growing capacity. From a handful of journalists and marketing and advertising personnel in 1983, the Post now has over 150 employees.

To keep up with the growing sophistication of its readers, the Post has continued to upgrade the quality of its employees, especially its journalists. Various training courses are made available to its editorial and non-editorial staff. It also regularly sends employees overseas for training.

In 1994, the Post became the first Indonesian newspaper to go global under a project nicknamed "Go International". Three global companies providing database services from three different parts of the world signed agreements with the Post to make the paper accessible 24 hours a day to tens of thousands of their subscribers around the world.

Under the arrangements, the Post is transmitted every morning in digitalized format via modem to three main computers in New York in USA, London in the UK and Palo Alto in California, USA, each owned by Chamber World Network, Reuters and Dialog, making the paper the first in this country to go international without the heavy burden of transportation costs.

Chamber World Network is a German-based company set up by the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce. It operates a computerized database in New York that provides information services to thousands of German companies in Europe, North America and Asia. The agreement to provide the Post on a daily basis to the Chamber World Network database in New York was signed in May 1994 in Jakarta.

A similar deal was signed on July 1, 1994 with Reuters Limited, a world renowned information services company based in London. Reuters operates computerized services for the retrieval of information, collated and stored on its databases which are also available to Reuters third-party distributors. By transmitting the Post daily to the Reuters main database, the paper is accessible not only through computer terminals subscribing to Reuters around the world, but also through similar equipment hooked up to other database services across Europe and North America such as Data Star, FT Profile, Global Scan, Maid, Mead Data and BT Telecom Gold.

The agreement with Dialog Information Services Inc. was signed in mid-July 1994 and gives the Post greater exposure across the United States of America. Dialog is a Palo Alto-based company owned by the Knight Ridder group of media companies which controls a large network of media companies across the USA. It has been serving users since 1972 and now has more than 450 databases from a broad scope of disciplines.

The "Go International" project is a direct response to the Post's mission to bring forward an Indonesian perspective on national and global issues amid the deluge of Western viewpoints dominating the global flow of information. It stands up to the expectations raised by the commitment of the Post to become "The Journal of Indonesia Today".

It is simultaneously a strategic step challenging the future of blurring lines separating the up to now distinctly different media types providing news, views and entertainment to the global audience.