About Indopos

Indopos

Indopos is an Indonesian-language online newspaper based in Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia, and was formerly a daily printed newspaper serving Jakarta and its surrounding region. It was first published on 25 February 2003 by PT Indopos Intermedia Press, a subsidiary of the Jawa Pos Group, and was widely described as the Jakarta version of Jawa Pos, the Surabaya-based newspaper around which one of Indonesia's largest newspaper networks was built. The printed edition ceased publication on 30 December 2020, after seventeen years, and the title continued as an online outlet, published at indopos.co.id and later also at indoposco.id, under PT Indonesia Digital Pos from headquarters in Tangerang.

Launch as the Jawa Pos Group's Jakarta daily

Indopos was created to give the Jawa Pos Group a daily newspaper of its own in the capital. The group's flagship, Jawa Pos, had been founded in Surabaya in 1949 and, after its revival in the 1980s under Eric Samola and Dahlan Iskan, had grown into the centre of the Jawa Pos News Network, a chain of scores of local newspapers across Indonesia built on the strategy of owning strong titles in provincial markets. Jakarta, however, was the hardest market in the country: it was already served by long-established national dailies, above all Kompas, and by a crowd of metropolitan titles competing for the same readers and advertisers.

The first edition of Indopos appeared on 25 February 2003. At launch the paper was headquartered in the Graha Pena Jawa Pos building in West Jakarta, the Jakarta tower of the Jawa Pos Group, whose Surabaya Graha Pena headquarters had been completed in 1997 and whose Jakarta counterpart followed in 2002. Contemporary business analysis treated the new title as a serious competitive event: the arrival of Indopos, alongside the Tempo group's Koran Tempo, briefly unsettled the capital's established papers, which responded with promotional campaigns of their own. The paper's proposition was to apply the Jawa Pos formula of accessible, locally rooted metropolitan journalism to the Greater Jakarta area.

Circulation, distribution, and publishing pattern

Indopos circulated mainly within the Special Capital Region of Jakarta, together with Banten and West Java provinces, the vast commuter belt that surrounds the capital. Its reported circulation reached 103,720 copies as of 2019, a figure also described at the time of its closure as a claimed circulation of about 104,000. For a regional metropolitan daily competing against national titles printed in the same city, that was a substantial print run, and it placed Indopos among the larger-circulation papers of the capital region.

The paper was not published on Sundays, appearing six days a week. Alongside the newspaper itself, the publisher issued iFACE, a lifestyle magazine published three times a month, extending the title's reach into the lifestyle and consumer advertising market. The combination of a six-day metropolitan newspaper and a lifestyle supplement magazine was typical of Indonesian newspaper groups of the period, which used magazine products to hold advertising categories, such as retail, entertainment, and consumer goods, that a hard-news daily carried less naturally.

Reporting in the capital and the 2005 office attack

Metropolitan reporting in Jakarta in the 2000s could be physically dangerous work, and Indopos experienced that directly. On the night of 20 December 2005, members of a gang known as the Hercules group forced their way into the newspaper's office in Kebayoran Lama, South Jakarta, and terrorised the staff for three and a half hours. The attackers were seeking a reporter, Deri Ahirianto, whose story about changes in the Tanah Abang area of Central Jakarta, a district associated with the gang's control, had appeared in the paper's gossip column on 19 December. They demanded clarification of the story and complained that the reporter had not interviewed or confirmed it with them.

Three reporters, Suyunus Rizki, Dilianto, and Berto Riyadi, were beaten in the attack. Dilianto suffered a broken nose that required an operation. The Southeast Asian Press Alliance, reporting through the IFEX network, condemned the attack, noting that the use of violent means against a newsroom would further frighten a media community that had already experienced violent mob attacks. The episode entered the international press-freedom record as an example of the risks run by local reporters covering the informal power structures of the capital, and of how a single short column item could bring organised retaliation into a newsroom.

The difficulty of the Jakarta market

Despite its circulation, Indopos never displaced the capital's established dailies. Academic assessments of the Jawa Pos Group's expansion have singled out the Jakarta daily as the group's most notable failure in an otherwise highly successful strategy of building dominant local newspapers in the regions. In province after province, the group's titles became the leading local paper; in Jakarta, Indopos faced Kompas and other long-entrenched competitors with national distribution, deeper advertising relationships, and older reader loyalties. The group's own philosophy, as Dahlan Iskan expressed it, was to build from small local bases that grew steadily, and Jakarta was the one major market where that formula did not produce a market leader.

The paper nevertheless endured for seventeen years, far longer than most of the new Jakarta dailies launched in the early Reformasi period, many of which disappeared within a few years of their founding. Its longevity rested on the resources of one of Indonesia's largest newspaper groups and on a metropolitan readership across Jakarta, Banten, and West Java that sustained a six-figure claimed circulation into 2019, even as the economics of Indonesian print were deteriorating across the industry.

The end of the printed edition

The printed newspaper's final phase coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated declines in circulation and advertising that Indonesian newspapers had been experiencing for years as readers and advertisers moved to social media and the internet. On 4 January 2021, Rizky Darmawindra, the director and main shareholder of PT Indopos Intermedia Press, informed employees through the company's WhatsApp group that Indopos would cease operations from 30 December 2020. Contemporary reporting of the closure, which paired Indopos with the simultaneous end of the evening daily Suara Pembaruan, recorded that the paper had dozens of employees at the time of its closing, and that they were told they were entitled to their salaries plus an additional month's compensation, with claims to be made by 6 January 2021.

The closure date recorded for the print edition is 30 December 2020. The end of Indopos as a printed daily was widely reported as part of a broader wave of Indonesian newspaper closures at the turn of the decade, in which titles that had survived the Asian financial crisis and the first decade of online competition finally succumbed to the combined pressure of falling print revenue and the pandemic.

Continuation online and the move to Tangerang

The Indopos name did not disappear with the print edition. Its online portal continued, managed first by PT Tunas Intermedia Globe and subsequently by PT Indonesia Digital Pos, the company under which the title operates as an online newspaper. Under its current ownership the outlet is headquartered in Tangerang, Banten, at the Puri Pakkita complex, Kavling 18 No. A.4, Jalan AMD-X, Kreo, Larangan. Tangerang, one of the large satellite cities of Greater Jakarta in Banten province, places the digital newsroom within the same metropolitan region the print paper had served, on its western side.

As an online outlet, Indopos publishes Indonesian-language news across the standard categories of a general news site, including national and metropolitan news, business and market coverage, crime, health, travel, education, and entertainment. Its catalogue record in international library listings carries the OCLC number 73638807, reflecting the print newspaper's distribution into library collections during its years as a Jakarta daily. The websites associated with the title are indopos.co.id and indoposco.id.

Publisher and group structure

Throughout its print life the newspaper was published by PT Indopos Intermedia Press, a subsidiary of the Jawa Pos Group. The group's structure helps to explain both the paper's resources and its role. Jawa Pos had formed the Jawa Pos News Network in 1987, which grew into one of the largest newspaper chains in Indonesia, with more than eighty newspapers, tabloids, and magazines and some forty printing plants across the country; by 2020 the group's own corporate listings counted as many as 174 regional newspapers and magazines. Within that structure, Indopos was listed among the group's titles for Jakarta, Banten, and West Java, alongside stablemates such as Rakyat Merdeka and Pos Metro in the capital and the Radar titles in Banten and West Java. After the print closure, ownership of the continuing online title passed to PT Indonesia Digital Pos, separating the digital outlet's corporate home from the print publisher while keeping the Indopos name in use.

Position in Indonesian media

Indopos is remembered in Indonesian media history principally as the Jawa Pos Group's capital-city newspaper: the attempt by the country's most successful regional newspaper network to plant its flag in Jakarta itself. It achieved a substantial circulation, sustained a newsroom in the capital for seventeen years, and produced reporting that at times brought it into direct conflict with the city's informal powers, as the 2005 attack on its office demonstrated. Its print closure at the end of 2020, announced to its staff in the first days of 2021, marked the end of that experiment in print, while its continuation as a Tangerang-based online newspaper kept one of the better-known metropolitan newspaper names of the Reformasi era in publication.