About Indonesia Raya (website)

Indonesia Raya (website)

Indonesia Raya is an Indonesian national online news website headquartered in Bogor, West Java, published at indonesiaraya.co.id. First published on 8 December 2017, it is the parent site of the Indonesia Raya Group, abbreviated IRG, a network that recruits local journalists at provincial and regency level across Indonesia. The website was founded by senior journalist Budi Purnomo Karjodihardjo, who serves as its editor-in-chief and whose earlier career in the media teams of national political campaigns is an unusual and well-documented part of the outlet's identity. It publishes news, opinion and articles on national, political and social issues in the Indonesian language, and operates commercially.

Not the Historic Indonesia Raya Newspaper

The website shares its name with two other famous uses of the words Indonesia Raya, and reference sources are careful to separate them. The historic Indonesia Raya was a Jakarta daily newspaper co-founded in 1949 by the journalist Mochtar Lubis. That newspaper was banned repeatedly under both the Sukarno and Suharto governments, did not publish between 1958 and 1968, reported aggressively on corruption in the state oil company Pertamina after its return, and was banned again and closed permanently in 1974 following the Malari incident. Indonesia Raya is also the title of Indonesia's national anthem, composed by Wage Rudolf Supratman and introduced in 1928. The Bogor website profiled here, founded in 2017, has no connection with the Lubis newspaper or its history: it is a separate, twenty-first-century digital outlet that happens to carry the same patriotic name, and its own history begins with its first online publication in December 2017.

Launch on 8 December 2017

The indonesiaraya.co.id domain began publishing on 8 December 2017. From the outset the site was designed not as a stand-alone portal but as the parent, or induk, of the Indonesia Raya Group network, the central masthead under which local partner media and local journalists in the provinces and regencies would operate. That network-first design distinguishes it from most Indonesian online start-ups of the period, which typically began as a single local portal and only later considered expansion. Indonesia Raya instead presented itself from its first year as a national site based outside the capital: its head office is in the city of Bogor, in West Java, roughly sixty kilometres south of Jakarta, rather than in Jakarta itself, while its reporting agenda is national in scope.

Founder Budi Purnomo Karjodihardjo

The founder and editor-in-chief, Budi Purnomo Karjodihardjo, is described in reference sources as a senior journalist who had worked in the media centre teams of national political figures. In the 2014 presidential election he appears in academic and press accounts as director of communications and media for the Prabowo Subianto-Hatta Rajasa national campaign team, and as coordinator of the Prabowo Media Center, in which capacity he commented publicly on the selection of a vice-presidential candidate. In February 2016 the businessman and politician Sandiaga Uno appointed him coordinator of his media team, a role reported by the national newspaper Republika. In September 2018 the national news agency Antara reported that Budi Purnomo would accompany Hashim Djojohadikusumo in leading the media centre for the Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno presidential ticket. He is also associated with the Press Release Center Indonesia, a press-release distribution business. This background in political communications, spanning two presidential election cycles, predates the website's launch and forms the professional foundation on which Indonesia Raya was built in 2017.

Coverage and Editorial Scope

Indonesia Raya publishes current news and information on public issues across a wide set of desks. Reference sources list its coverage as including national news, economics, business, politics, law, metropolitan and megapolitan news, lifestyle, entertainment, sport, news from across the archipelago under its nusantara desk, and international news. Alongside straight news it publishes opinion pieces and articles on national, political and social questions. The breadth of that desk structure mirrors the standard architecture of Indonesia's national portals, and it is the framework within which its network of local journalists files: local reporting feeds the nusantara and regional coverage, while the Bogor-based parent site carries the national political and economic agenda set from the capital region.

The Indonesia Raya Group Network Model

The defining feature of the outlet is its network. As the parent of Indonesia Raya Group, the site develops partner media by involving local journalists at the level of provinces and of cities and regencies as part of a single news network. In the group's recruitment of new partners, journalistic teams in a region are offered their own news portal under the parent domain, in the form of a regional subdomain of indonesiaraya.co.id, carrying the region's name together with the Raya branding and logo. The model is aimed at small teams of local journalists who gain a ready-made portal, branding and network membership rather than having to build a website and a media business from nothing. This parent-and-partner structure explains why the Bogor site describes itself as an induk, or parent: its role is both to publish national news itself and to anchor a federation of local titles publishing under its name.

Joining the Promedia Ecosystem

Indonesia Raya subsequently joined the ecosystem of Promedia, the Indonesian media-technology group that supplies shared technology, training and commercial infrastructure to large numbers of partner online media. Indonesian business and media reporting presented the move as the site adopting a new model of news portal based on collaboration with Promedia's digital technology, and as a strategy for facing the transformation of the digital media industry. Promedia's wider model, described by its chief executive at National Press Day events in 2023, is to prepare the technology, servers and information-technology support while journalist partners concentrate on producing content, a collaborative arrangement under which the company said thousands of online media had joined by the end of 2022. For Indonesia Raya's own partner network, the Promedia arrangement added a further layer: local IRG teams were described as automatically becoming both members of the Indonesia Raya network and Promedia partners, with the parent site's fast-loading portal design replicated for partner sites.

Partner Support and the Collaborative Model

The benefits the group advertises to prospective local partners show how the network is intended to work in practice. Partner teams are offered technical guidance on managing a professional news portal from the beginning through to earning revenue, training in producing news content, video content and other media formats, support in turning content into other forms such as video, podcasts and photo galleries, content-production support including trending-issue material and cross-platform distribution, and access to performance data on content views, engagement and audience demographics. The commercial side is a revenue-sharing arrangement based on programmatic advertising and direct marketing. The parent site presents this as a route for local journalists to become media entrepreneurs inside an existing national brand, rather than competing against national portals alone.

Ownership, Status and Organisation

Indonesia Raya is managed by an organisation of the same name and is owned by its founder, Budi Purnomo Karjodihardjo, who combines the roles of owner and editor-in-chief. It is a commercial website, publishes in Indonesian, and its recorded status is active. Its headquarters in Bogor make it one of the Indonesian national portals directed from outside Jakarta, even though much of its subject matter, national politics and government, is centred on the capital. The combination of a politically experienced founder, a national desk structure, a branded local network and, later, membership of a large shared-technology ecosystem gives the site a distinctive profile among the Indonesian online media launched in the late 2010s.

Place in Indonesian Online Media

Indonesia Raya belongs to the wave of Indonesian digital outlets built around networks rather than single newsrooms. Where the country's older online giants grew one large portal, publishers of Indonesia Raya's generation grew by federation: a parent brand, local journalist partners publishing under regional versions of the brand, and shared technology and advertising supplied by an ecosystem partner such as Promedia. Judged on the facts reference sources record, the site's significance lies less in any single story than in that structure, and in the career of its founder, whose work for presidential campaign media teams in 2014 and 2019 is documented by the national news agency and national newspapers. The site remains active as a national Indonesian-language news website and as the parent of the Indonesia Raya Group.