About Radar Surabaya

Radar Surabaya

Radar Surabaya is an Indonesian-language broadsheet daily newspaper published in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, by PT Radar Media Surabaya as part of the Jawa Pos Group. It is the Jawa Pos network's city daily for Surabaya itself, the home city of Jawa Pos, and it is published together with two companion editions, Radar Sidoarjo and Radar Gresik, under the shared publishing company Radar Media Surabaya. The newspaper was founded on Saturday, 24 February 2001, and it circulates in the Surabaya metropolitan area known as Gerbangkertosusila, in practice the cities and regencies of Gresik, Surabaya and Sidoarjo. Its motto, used since its founding, is Untuk Surabaya dan Jatim Yang Lebih Progresif, meaning for a more progressive Surabaya and East Java. Its head office is at Jalan Kembang Jepun No. 167-169, Nyamplungan, Pabean Cantikan, Surabaya.

Founding and the Suara Indonesia Inheritance

Radar Surabaya began as a conversion of an existing title. Company histories recorded in Surabaya university studies state that Radar Surabaya started on 24 February 2001 and was originally the daily Suara Indonesia, whose editorial office was then in Graha Pena, the Jawa Pos headquarters building at Jalan Ahmad Yani 88, Surabaya. Suara Indonesia had been popular in the era of President Soeharto and had become known as a reform newspaper, although before that it had been a specialist economics newspaper with a very limited circulation. The reform movement of 1998 left readers saturated with political news, and the title's print run fell very significantly. The Jawa Pos Group management therefore decided to change Suara Indonesia into Radar Surabaya, refocused as a local newspaper for the city of Surabaya and its surroundings. Other institutional histories trace the predecessor title further back through a chain of Surabaya and Malang publishing ventures taken over first by the Sinar Harapan group in Jakarta and then, after further instability, by Jawa Pos, under which the paper was made into a reformasi newspaper before becoming a general newspaper in 1989 and finally being inaugurated as Radar Surabaya on Wednesday, 24 February 2001, a date its publisher notes coincided with the Chinese New Year 2552. The group's own reference listing dates the edition from 23 February 2001, while the paper's anniversary, its Wikipedia record and its company histories all use 24 February 2001, the date of its first issue as Radar Surabaya.

A Three-Title Publishing Company

What makes Radar Surabaya unusual among the Jawa Pos Radar editions is that a single company publishes three named local dailies. PT Radar Media Surabaya, which began as a subsidiary of Jawa Pos and later stood as a publishing company in its own right within the group, produces Radar Surabaya as its main product together with Radar Gresik and Radar Sidoarjo, which are usually sold in one package with it. Each title carries its own local identity and its own motto: Radar Surabaya's is Untuk Surabaya dan Jatim Yang Lebih Progresif, Radar Sidoarjo's is Koran Kebanggaan Warga Sidoarjo, the pride of the people of Sidoarjo, and Radar Gresik's is Koran Kebanggaan Warga Gresik, the pride of the people of Gresik. Each also keeps its own office: Radar Sidoarjo at Ruko Delta Wijaya C 03, Jalan Raya Jenggolo No. 2, Siwalanpanji, Buduran, Sidoarjo, and Radar Gresik at Pudak Galeri, Jalan Pahlawan No. 29, Bedilan, Gresik. The structure lets one newsroom system serve three distinct local markets that together form a single metropolitan economy.

The Metropolitan Area It Serves

Surabaya is the capital of East Java province and the second-largest city in Indonesia, extending over about 336 square kilometres, with a metropolitan area of more than six thousand square kilometres that includes Mojokerto, Gresik, Sidoarjo, Bangkalan and Lamongan and had an estimated population of 10.08 million in 2024, the second-largest urban area in the country. The city is known as Kota Pahlawan, the City of Heroes, for the Battle of Surabaya during the Indonesian National Revolution, commemorated on Heroes' Day, 10 November. It is one of Indonesia's principal financial, commercial, industrial, transportation and entertainment hubs, and it is home to the Port of Tanjung Perak, the country's second-busiest seaport and the main port for the eastern part of Java. Radar Surabaya's circulation territory of Surabaya, Sidoarjo and Gresik, with Krian also named in company profiles, is the industrial core of that metropolis: Surabaya's port, commerce and provincial government, Sidoarjo's manufacturing and commuter districts, and Gresik's heavy industry and port development. A city daily in this market competes for readers who also have the group's own flagship Jawa Pos, published in the same city, which is why Radar Surabaya was positioned from the start as the more narrowly local, neighbourhood-level paper beneath the metropolitan flagship.

Relationship to Jawa Pos and the Group

Radar Surabaya's publisher sits inside the largest newspaper organisation in Indonesia. Jawa Pos was founded in Surabaya on 1 July 1949 by The Chung Shen under the name Djava-Post, declined to about 6,800 copies a day by 1982, and was then bought by PT Grafiti Pers and rebuilt by Dahlan Iskan, growing to about 350,000 copies in the 1990s and to an average daily circulation of 842,000 in 2017 Nielsen data, the highest readership in Indonesia. The Jawa Pos News Network, formed in 1987, grew to more than 80 newspapers, tabloids and magazines with a printing network across the country, and the wider Jawa Pos Group came to own regional newspapers and magazines numbered at up to 174 in its 2020 corporate listing, together with television stations. Within that system the Radar titles are the local layer, and in East Java they are especially dense: group listings name Radar Surabaya alongside Radar Banyuwangi, Radar Mojokerto, Radar Jember, Radar Madiun, Radar Bromo, Radar Kediri, Radar Bojonegoro, Radar Malang, Radar Madura and others, most founded in a wave in 1999 to 2002 as Jawa Pos converted provincial dominance into city-by-city local papers. Radar Surabaya, founded in 2001, was the home-city product of that same wave.

How the Newsroom Works

University studies of the Radar Surabaya newsroom describe a working system closely modelled on Jawa Pos itself. Reporters are the spearhead of the editorial operation, sent out to find the most up-to-date news of the day against a 6 p.m. deadline, writing their stories and handing them to the editorial desk the same day. Inside the newsroom, work is directed by the editor-in-chief, the deputy editor-in-chief and the managing editor, who lead the editorial staff and handle important editorial questions, including whether a story fits the agreed vision and mission. Accuracy is enforced firmly: if an error in layout or in the words of a story is found before printing it can simply be corrected, but an error that reaches the printed and distributed paper brings a sanction, recorded in one study as a cut to the professional allowance. The description is of a disciplined metropolitan desk run to daily deadlines, operating in the same building culture and to the same standards as the parent Jawa Pos newsroom from which the title was created.

A Hybrid Local Newspaper

Academic typology research on Indonesian local newspapers has used Radar Surabaya as one of its principal cases. A plural case study of local hybrid newspapers examined Radar Surabaya together with Radar Jogja and Radar Solo, chosen because they operate locally in Indonesia's two most populous provinces, East Java and Central Java, and applied cross-case synthesis to identify the patterns that make such papers hybrids: locally produced and locally sold, yet created, branded and supported by a national-scale group. That framing captures Radar Surabaya's position precisely. Its content, advertising and circulation are metropolitan Surabaya's own, its reporters work Surabaya, Sidoarjo and Gresik beats, and its three titles speak to three civic identities, while its ownership, printing infrastructure, news exchange and brand all belong to the Jawa Pos system centred a short distance away in the same city. The hybrid model was the group's answer to the economics of local journalism: a city paper that a stand-alone publisher could not have sustained, made viable by shared group services.

Print Resilience in the Digital Era

Radar Surabaya has been cited among the Jawa Pos Radar titles that held up best as Indonesian print circulation contracted. Commentary reviewing the group's position in the digital era noted that of 17 Radar newspapers, only three had raised their print runs, and named Radar Surabaya as one of the three, alongside Radar Bali and Radar Kudus, at a time when the other fourteen had declined and when Jawa Pos's own historic daily print figures, once reported between about 433,000 and 842,000 copies, had become closely held company information. For a metropolitan city title competing with its own group's flagship, free online news and social media in Indonesia's second city, continued print growth placed Radar Surabaya among the strongest performers in the entire Radar network.

Digital Publishing

Radar Surabaya has been available in an official online edition since 23 July 2008, and it now publishes at radarsurabaya.jawapos.com within the Jawa Pos web system. Its digital operation is organised as a separate company, PT Radar Media Digital Surabaya, described by the publisher as led by young people with a progressive movement following the trends of the era. Radar Media Digital manages four websites: Radar Surabaya, Radar Sidoarjo, Radar Gresik and Radar Surabaya Bisnis, the business channel of the Surabaya title. The four-site structure reproduces the print company's three-city logic online and adds a dedicated business vertical for the metropolitan economy, so the group's Surabaya local franchise now exists as a small digital network of its own inside the larger Jawa Pos online system.

Position in Surabaya Journalism

Surabaya is the historic centre of Indonesian newspaper publishing outside Jakarta, the city where Jawa Pos itself was founded in 1949 and where the Jawa Pos Group remains headquartered. Radar Surabaya's role in that ecology is specific: it is the group's city paper, founded in February 2001 from the former Suara Indonesia, organised as a three-title company covering Surabaya, Sidoarjo and Gresik, written to a progressive civic motto and run to the parent newsroom's deadline discipline. It continues to publish daily in broadsheet print and through its four digital channels, as the local layer of Indonesia's largest newspaper network in the network's own home metropolis.