Sad but true - Asking the right questions and analysing an issue beyond what it appears on the surface are the biggest challenges.
Anyway, I hope Plott - and anyone in the newsroom, for that matter - will stick to what the man says on the last two paragraphs.
Enjoy.
The Australian
Monday, September 29, 2008
Indonesian Tycoon To Launch New Daily
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta correspondent
LAUNCHING a new newspaper in the face of global circulation woes, staff cutbacks and cries of the death of the medium would seem an ambitious, even foolhardy, move.
But for Indonesian media, property, infrastructure and banking tycoon James Riady, the imminent arrival on the streets of his latest project, the Jakarta Globe, makes good enough sense.
What's more, it's an endeavour that has attracted the interest of former News Corporation executive Lachlan Murdoch, who is reported to be looking at other media investments in Indonesia with Riady.
The 48-page, full-colour English-language broadsheet newspaper will be distributed initially in major Indonesian cities and Singapore, with a print run of
"over 50,000", according to launch editor David Plott.
Plott, a former editor-in-chief at the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, has been working since last December to assemble the team that will bring Riady's dream to fruition. And global seismic wobbles in the newspaper industry are the least
of the tycoon's concerns, according to Plott.
"Indonesia's a little like India, in the sense that it's a market where print publications are still quite profitable and there's still quite a lot of growth potential; in terms of advertising it's a $US3 billion a year market," he says.
The Globe will have just one direct competitor in the local market: the Jakarta Post, an English-language daily which has a circulation of barely 18,000 copies. The Globe will also have an integrated website, although negotiations are continuing with a local news aggregator already operating the jakartaglobe.com domain. Plott is hopeful the Globe will leave the Jakarta Post for dead, although he admits the lack of quality Indonesian print journalism, particularly in the field of analysis and
investigative reporting, let alone the thorny issue of writing in a language still not used outside a reasonably small elite, has affected the project.
Retraining reporters to produce an ``international standard newspaper'' has presented significant challenges.
``Newspapers aren't what they used to be,'' admits Plott, who has split his new responsibilities in Riady's Globe Media group with those of teaching journalism at the University of Hong Kong and running the political quarterly Global Asia (unrelated to the Riady endeavour).
``You can't survive by just reporting what happened, particularly in Indonesia, where things aren't always what they appear to be, and what's actually going on behind events is not clear to anyone except insiders.''
Despite a flowering of print and other news media outlets since the 1998 fall of strongman Suharto -- whose 32-year reign saw a savage curtailment of press freedoms -- Indonesian news and analytical journalism often demonstrates how far it has yet to
go.
Asking tough questions of politicians -- let alone checking facts or digging into corporate bookkeeping in an attempt to uncover the collusion that still dominates Indonesian commercial and political life -- is not the norm.
But, insists Plott, ``all the great newspapers in the world have built up their news culture over time, and even the best of those newspapers have failed the higher standards of journalism, sometimes shockingly so''.
That there is serious weight at the top of the Jakarta Globe tree is not in doubt, even as Plott is set to cede direct control of the operation after the launch to focus on further Globe Media expansion. And Murdoch's recent visit and talks with
Riady have also opened up further possibilities.
Day-to-day operations will be taken over by former Hong Kong Standard executive editor Lin Neumann, former AFP (Agence France-Presse) Indonesian reporter Bhimanto Suwastoyo and former Newsweek and DPA (Deutsche Press-Agentur) Indonesia correspondent Joe Cochrane.
But even with such credible leadership at the newspaper, questions remain as to whether Riady -- whose family was a major political player during the Suharto era, and who himself has been at the heart of a range of scandals, including the infamous
1992 Democratic party funding that ensnared Bill Clinton's presidential campaign -- will be prepared to let it operate independently.
Riady, who paid millions of dollars in criminal fines in the US over the party funding affair, declined to be interviewed for this article. However, it is fair to say that his Lippo group has such extensive interests in Indonesia that it would be hard to write a story in his own newspaper that did not have some connection with the family business.
``I don't think James Riady would've engaged my services or allowed me to hire the people we've hired here, if the intention was for this to be a mouthpiece for a particular business group, a particular ethnic group, a religious view,'' Plott says.
``Opinions will be expressed on the opinion page, and Riady knows that's the place where they belong.''
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