Unspun

My old friends in the Jakarta Post will be delighted. Competition to them mean pay rises as newspapers compete for talent in a town where the Jakarta Post has reigned supreme and uncontested over the past few years.

One English-language daily has already been launched on the quiet,

The paper claims to be circulated in all the ASEAN countries.

Several things leap out at you about the paper, which is mostly in colour. One of them are the standfirsts. While the headlines and copy of the paper are in English, the standfirsts are in Indonesian. Weird. Whatever can be the purpose of it? Draw in Indonesian readers to an English-language paper? Ngak nyambung.
The other thing that becomes obvious to the reader are the news about Jababekalia. Plastered on the 27 July Edition’s front page is a photo of DPR Vice Speaker Yahya Muhaimin and Setyono Djunaidi Darmono who’s a director at — you guessed it — PT Jababeka. The page 2 lead is about a seminar at the — you would have guessed it — President Institute and on Page 3 the lead story is a Q&A with Yunizar the manager of The Polo Club Bar, which is owned by — on stop it! You get the picture.

This is no way to run a newspaper without having the world laugh at you. If the Jababeka group wants to run its own newsletter then they should just get a blog, a website of print out a newsletter. To dress it up as a newspaper and pretend it is one while a large portion of what it does is hagiography of the Jababeka idols is silly, wasteful and will not win the paper respect or readers.

The headline writing as well as copy could also be tighter if it wants to compete with the Jakarta Post the front page headline, for example , was verbose, not to mention in passive voice. Regulation on investment is to be revised by DPR would be punchier and more concise if substituted with DPR to revise investment rules.

Still, the Jababeka guys have deep pockets and if they can just get around to the fact that for a paper to be respected and bought it must get rid of the tendency of their top people to want to see their own faces in the paper, as well as tighten up its editorial, it might yet give the Post a run for the money.

But there’s a long way off. IKn nthe meantime a third English-launguage daily, The Grapevine tells us, is about to make it entry. It is to be called The Point and will be edited by a former Antara journalist called RI. We’ll try to find out more about them next week. In the meantime, I’m off to Puncak for my office’s annual retreat. Have a good weekend.