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Six months ago, when I came for an interview at this new newspaper initiated by a world-class Indonesian tycoon, the office was just a small apartment suite with three people in it, as well as three sets of computer.

Five months ago, when I started working, they had moved to a bigger office suite, with meeting rooms and a pantry. We, however, had to share a long table so when we typed, we were elbow-to-elbow with our deskmates.

We learned to write a news story from scratch. For me, it was like college all over again, only this time it was for real. I learned how to call people and nag them for a short interview, and composed them together in an article.

A month later, we moved to a real newsroom. It’s huge, it has big screen TVs in every corner, we have our own cubicle, and there’s even a bedroom. Plus shower stalls in the bathroom. We started to speed things up, having the paper printed in A3 paper and photocopied every single day. We enrolled in trainings in between our days writing for a paper that no one but us read.

After a while, the paper was printed like a real newspaper, even though the quality was not far from Warta Kota. The colors were smudged, you could barely see Dilbert on the last page. There were mispells of names, titles, and places. Still, we went to cover events, wrote about them, and read them because no one else could.

Today, after thousands of people questioning when the paper’s gonna be published, Jakarta Globe was out on the streets. Banners were hung, wreaths were lined up, and there was even a balloon shower in our office’s editors pod right in the middle of the newsroom.

I am a published writer! People now can read my stories, and who knows, it might change their minds and opinions about Indonesia. I hope at least it will inform them of what the hell is going on in this messed up country.

It started in an apartment suite, and now it’s here. Maybe what Yoyok told me earlier today was right; I may just be a part of history, whatever future will be for the newspaper.