About Konde.co

Konde.co

Konde.co is an Indonesian online media outlet that publishes from the perspective of women and minority groups, with a focus on gender equality and the rights of marginalised communities. Based in Jakarta, it publishes in both Indonesian and English, operates commercially without requiring reader registration, and remains active. Konde.co was founded on 8 March 2016 by members of a community known as the Konde Institute, and it works under the spirit summed up in its slogan, "Voice of Voiceless": giving public space to people whose experiences are rarely centred in mainstream Indonesian media. Its best-known figure is its founder and editor-in-chief, Luviana Ariyanti, a journalist and labour and gender activist whose own experience of workplace discrimination in television helped prompt the outlet's creation. In the years since its launch, Konde.co has combined slow, in-depth journalism with advocacy-oriented desks, documentary films, books and media research, and it has continued publishing despite repeated cyberattacks linked to its reporting on sexual violence.

Founding on 8 March 2016 and the Konde Institute

Konde.co was established on 8 March 2016, a date that coincides with International Women's Day, by several people who belonged to a community called the Konde Institute. Academic studies of the outlet describe it as alternative media born from shared concern about marginalisation, discrimination, subordination, violence and stigma directed at women, and from a determination to change that inequality through media work. The idea for a digital outlet dedicated to women and minorities had occurred to Luviana as early as 2013, according to research on Indonesian women's online activism, but it took until 2016 for the outlet to be established. One catalyst identified in that research was Luviana's own dismissal from Metro TV, one of Indonesia's main commercial television stations, where she had worked for years before being retrenched from a production role after criticising staff working conditions and demanding improvements; she had also planned to form a union and had requested changes sensitive to gender and human rights. Konde.co was therefore founded not simply as a news website but as a deliberate counterweight: a media organisation built by people who believed mainstream coverage overlooked farmers, factory workers and other vulnerable groups, and who intended the new outlet to focus on their plight.

The Name Konde and the Outlet's Identity

The name Konde.co is taken from the konde, the hair bun traditionally worn by women in Indonesia. Reference accounts explain that the bun was chosen because its forms and ways of wearing vary widely, reflecting the diverse characters and cultures of Indonesian society; the name thus signals both femininity and plurality at once. The outlet's visual identity develops the same idea. As described by the Media Diversity Institute, the Konde logo shows a woman's head wearing glasses with three hair bun pins at the back, inspired by paes, the traditional Central Javanese bridal makeup, with a red mark on the forehead instead of the usual black or green. Below the image sit three taglines: Women, Marginal, and Intersection. Those three words summarise the editorial territory the outlet has occupied since 2016: the lives of women, the condition of marginalised groups, and the way gender intersects with class, work and access to opportunity. Other studies of the outlet record its use of the tagline "Media for Women and Minority," and its own site describes its founding purpose as managing public space from the perspective of women and minorities as part of building public awareness and critical capacity.

Luviana Ariyanti: Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Luviana Ariyanti, usually called Luvi, is the central figure in Konde.co's story. Academic profiles of her career record more than twenty-five years of experience across radio, television and print media: she worked as a broadcaster and reporter at RB FM radio from 1993 to 1999, as an editor of Jurnal Perempuan (Women's Journal) from 1999 to 2002, as a researcher and trainer at the research and education institute LP3Y from 1998 to 2002, in production at Metro TV from 2002 to 2014, and as a senior editor at radio KBR 68H from 2014 to 2016, before founding Konde.co in 2016 and serving as its editor-in-chief since then. Her dispute with Metro TV, in which she was dismissed after seeking to organise workers and demand better conditions, ended before the Industrial Relations Court, which ordered Metro TV to pay her severance of sixteen months' salary, according to academic writing on the case; the episode was also the subject of the 2013 documentary Di Balik Frekuensi. Alongside her newsroom work, Luviana has taught at Paramadina University in Jakarta, where she took a master's degree in communication studies, has worked with United Nations agencies including training labour and domestic workers in journalism for the International Labour Organization, and has contributed to reporting connected with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. She is a member of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) and has been active in its gender work. The Media Diversity Institute records that she was nominated for the United Nations N-Peace Award in 2014 and was named Indonesia's best journalist in 2023. Konde.co's editorial team under her includes a deputy chief editor, Salsabila Putri Pertiwi, a managing editor, a special editor, a multimedia manager, staff and an IT officer, supported outside the newsroom by an executive manager, a research and development manager, two collaboration staff and a financial supervisor.

Editorial Mission: Women, Minorities and Marginalised Workers

Konde.co's journalism is organised around a clear editorial mission: to report from the perspective of women and minorities and to raise issues of gender equality that mainstream media often treat from a majority, patriarchal point of view. Its coverage spans violence against women, sexual violence, feminism, the persecution of women, technology-facilitated misogyny and the misuse of women's personal data, as well as the struggles of female factory workers, farmers, domestic workers and women in vulnerable employment. Reporting by the outlet is deliberately connective: its feature articles are intended as a bridge between the public, non-governmental organisations and academics, and its journalists are also tasked with maintaining community networks and taking part in civic movements, a practice the outlet understands as public journalism. Researchers who studied the outlet note that it treats women's issues as matters of both culture and political economy, combining questions of the body with questions of class and access to opportunity. Konde.co has four contributors based outside Jakarta who assist coverage in East Nusa Tenggara, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Malang and other areas, giving space to women's issues in places other media rarely cover, and it also accepts curated writing from outside contributors and maintains a dedicated contributor for translation into its English section.

Slow Journalism, Special Editions and Audience Reach

Editorially, Konde.co practises what has been described as slow journalism. According to the Media Diversity Institute's profile, the outlet focuses on in-depth reporting of at least 1,500 words, publishes all of its website content in that long-form style, and also produces a monthly special edition of sixty pages. Shorter versions of stories circulate quickly on social media, where younger audiences read summaries, while the full article appears on the Konde.co website. Luviana has said that weekly Instagram readership alone can reach 1.5 to 2 million, that total reach including X, TikTok and Facebook can reach 3 million, and that the website itself receives some 3,000 to 4,000 readers per day. Special editions have addressed subjects such as misinformation and disinformation targeting women, including reporting on human trafficking that drew on survivors' testimony gathered in eastern Indonesia, and the forgery of women's images into nude pictures using artificial intelligence. The combination of long-form website journalism, monthly special editions and intensive social media distribution defines how the outlet reaches an audience far larger than its small newsroom might suggest.

Specialist Desks: The Women's Legal Clinic and Workers' Voices

Beyond its general reporting, Konde.co runs specialist desks that connect journalism with direct public service and advocacy. Its Women's Legal Clinic desk (Klinik Hukum Perempuan) is run in cooperation with Koran Tempo, the legal aid institute LBH APIK Jakarta, Kalyanamitra and the Gender Advocates Coalition, providing a channel through which women's legal problems are discussed publicly with experienced partners. Its Workers' Voices desk (Suara Pekerja) was developed to voice the concerns of workers across Indonesia and to campaign to stop violence and harassment in the world of work, and its launch was connected with support for International Labour Organization Convention 190 on violence and harassment at work. These desks reflect the outlet's founding analysis: that the issues it covers, from sexual violence to precarious labour, are not only news subjects but areas where readers may need information, solidarity and routes to help. The newsroom supports this work with internal standards, including feminist writing guidelines, internal training and regular evaluation of its journalistic products, and with careful inclusive language, such as using respectful terms for sex workers and for people with disabilities rather than stigmatising labels, as its managing editor has explained in interviews about covering women and minority issues.

Films, Books and Research

Konde.co's output extends well beyond its website. Its documentary film More Than Work, directed by Luviana and telling the darker side of women media workers' lives, was nominated in the short documentary category at the 2019 Festival Film Dokumenter, described as the first documentary film festival in Southeast Asia, and was screened in a number of Indonesian cities. Another Konde.co film, Sampai Ujung Laut, tells the story of fishers fighting for subsidised fuel and was released for viewing on the Bioskoponline.com platform. In publishing and research, Konde.co has produced studies of how media write about sexual violence and about draft legislation on eliminating sexual violence; the book Their Story, presenting research on how media view non-normative gender and sexual diversity; and Ini Ceritaku Dulu dan Kini, a collection of domestic workers' life stories accompanied by research on how the media write about domestic workers. Research supported by Yayasan IPAS Indonesia examined how the media write about abortion. Konde.co also served as a writer of a report on the condition of media and women in Indonesia prepared with the CEDAW Working Group Indonesia in the context of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and it campaigned alongside others for the passage of Indonesia's sexual violence crimes bill until it was enacted into law. An article by the outlet about marginal workers during the pandemic was named among the ten best journalistic works in a 2022 competition held by the International Labour Organization and the Alliance of Independent Journalists.

Cyberattacks and Press Freedom Pressures

Konde.co's reporting has repeatedly been followed by digital attacks. In May 2020, after the outlet intensively covered sexual violence allegations involving an alumnus of the Islamic University of Indonesia and held a Konde Women's Talk discussion of the case on 15 May 2020, its official Twitter account was hacked and could no longer be accessed, with takeover attempts traced by the Alliance of Independent Journalists to Yogyakarta and the Netherlands; attempts were also made to hack the newsroom's email, without success. Amnesty International Indonesia documented the episode as part of a wave of digital attacks on students, journalists and activists, noting that Konde.co and Magdalene were among the leading online portals promoting minority and women's rights. In October 2022 the outlet was hit again, this time by a distributed denial-of-service attack that disabled its website after it published a report about an alleged rape case at the Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises, an attack recorded by journalist safety organisations alongside similar attacks on Narasi TV and Batamnews.co.id in the same period. Despite these pressures, the outlet has continued to publish, and its leadership presents that persistence as part of its mission to keep reporting on gender and marginalised groups in a human rights context.

Working Culture, Funding and Sustainability

As an alternative media outlet without the business structure of a large media group, Konde.co faces recurring funding challenges, a difficulty its founder discusses openly. Studies of Indonesian alternative media note that, to protect its independence, Konde.co has relied substantially on donor support and on its offline activities rather than on mass-market advertising. Inside the newsroom, the outlet applies the labour standards it campaigns for: according to its deputy chief editor, the standard working day is eight hours in line with labour regulations, staff need to come into the office only one day a week and may work from anywhere on other days, and weekend work is compensated so that overtime does not become excessive. The team works from a small office of about 861 square feet on the fourth floor of its building, from which it publishes articles and produces feminist books, videos and documentaries about violence against women. This combination of a small physical footprint, flexible working arrangements and project-based support is characteristic of Indonesia's alternative media sector, and it shapes both what Konde.co can do and the precariousness with which it does it.

Place in Indonesian Media

Within Indonesia's media landscape, Konde.co occupies the position of an advocacy-minded alternative outlet: smaller than the commercial portals, but cited by academics, rights organisations and international media-development groups as a reference point for how women and minority issues can be covered. Scholars describe it, together with Magdalene, as counter-hegemonic media born of concern that mainstream outlets follow majority and patriarchal perspectives, and research published through the Media Diversity Institute and in conference proceedings treats it as a case study in gender activism through journalism. Its reporting has had practical effects, including an exposé of a job scam after which police confirmed that a recruiter and agency would be detained and investigated for human trafficking. For directory readers, Konde.co is best understood as a Jakarta-based, bilingual, women-led digital newsroom whose influence comes not from scale but from specialisation: a decade of sustained, long-form attention to women, workers and minorities, backed by research, film and legal and labour desks, and maintained in the face of documented attempts to silence it online.