The Jakarta Post is to be congratulated for, finally, coming up with its Weekender magazaine. Only that the Weekender is now a monthly and, if things go well, will be a forthnightly magazine. So a more apparoprate name would be The Second Weekender.

So much for the name. What about the content? It is 68 pages thick and on well produced on quality paper. But one has to wonder what the paper is out to achieve with the Wekender. Ideally, the Weekender should be aimed at the young Indonesians who are comfortable in English with large disposable incomes and are the future readership base of the newspaper, who’s readership is aging and will die off soon.

If such is the case then you’d expect the Weekender to be a light, lively read with lots of snippets of information on where to go, what to do, which band to watch and what to eat, Something informative and fun.

Fun, of course, is not for the serious minded at Les Grande Dame, The Jakarta Post. Their idea of fun is an upper crust party in one of the houses of Jakarta’s moneyed classes where one imbibes in polite intellectual conversation and ostentatious appreciation of each other’s branded accessories. Think diamond encrusted watches. Think expensive luxurious leather briefcases. Think bad-taste Da Vinci Penthouse suites. Think haute couture. Fine dining. The finer things in life.

So the Weekender reflects this state of mind. It is a heavy read and many articles are 1,200 words long or more. This puts it in the same competitive space for ads and readers as the social magazines like Tattler, Prestige etc. Uspun‘s sources in the Post confirm that what the lords and masters wanted was an advertising vehicle that would bring in lots of dosh, yet because the Post is the Post, it must have editorial integrity – which in this case translates into staid thinking and making a potentially exciting product as boring as, well, the Sunday Post.

This is a pity as Unspun thinks the Post could have, in one fell stroke, decimated the free entertainment magazine market, captured their advertisers and in the process reconnect with a younger readership that will revive the Post’s rather static growth in circulation and revenue. It then may not be very high brow but it would bring in more dosh from more advertisers and appeal to more readers.

Still, Unspun‘s been proved wrong before. Maybe the Weekender will be a great success because it is what the Indonesian English-language readership wants. What do other Post readers think, I wonder? (BTW I checked the website and there was absolutely no blurb for the Weekender. I suppose I should not go on about an interactive strategy for newspapers being essential as we move into a new age…)