About Koran Sindo

Koran Sindo

Koran Sindo was an Indonesian daily newspaper published in Jakarta by PT Media Nusantara Informasi, under Media Nusantara Citra, the MNC Media group. It was first published on 30 June 2005 as Harian Seputar Indonesia and was renamed Koran Sindo in 2013, as part of a rebranding of MNC's news assets under a single Sindo Media brand. It carried the slogan Sumber Referensi Terpercaya, Trusted Source of Reference, was known for the infographics displayed on its front page, and published its last edition, a weekend edition, on 15 April 2023. Indonesian sources list Sururi Alfaruq as its founder and Pung Purwanto as editor-in-chief, and give its headquarters as the fourth floor of Gedung Sindo, Jalan K. H. Wahid Hasyim No. 38, Menteng, Central Jakarta.

A name taken from a television news programme

The word Sindo in the newspaper's name was an abbreviation of Seputar Indonesia, the former flagship news programme on RCTI, the MNC television station, which later evolved into Seputar iNews. The newspaper was therefore launched as a print extension of a television brand that Indonesian viewers already knew. Its earliest name, Harian Seputar Indonesia — Seputar Indonesia Daily — made that connection explicit, and an earlier motto recorded for the paper, Satu Koran Segala Berita, One Newspaper, All the News, presented it as a complete general newspaper rather than a television tie-in alone.

This origin placed Koran Sindo inside one of Indonesia's largest media groups from its first day. Media Nusantara Citra had television at its core, and the newspaper was born as the group's daily print title, able to draw on the news gathering of a broadcast organisation while offering advertisers a printed national daily. That group backing distinguished it from independent newspaper launches, and it also meant the paper's fortunes were tied to group decisions about which of its many media brands to keep, a fact that shaped both its 2013 renaming and its eventual closure.

Launch as Harian Seputar Indonesia in 2005

The newspaper was first published on 30 June 2005 as Harian Seputar Indonesia, published by PT Media Nusantara Informasi, a subsidiary of PT Media Nusantara Citra Tbk. Indonesian profiles of the paper describe it as a newcomer that set out to attract the attention of national newspaper readers and slowly established itself in competition with national papers that had arrived long before it, among them Kompas, Republika and Suara Pembaruan. A university profile of the company described the paper, as launched in 2005, as a progressive newspaper aimed at a dynamic segment of readers.

Entering the Jakarta national daily market in 2005 was a demanding proposition. The capital already had long-established broadsheets with loyal readerships, distribution networks and printing arrangements built over decades. Sindo's answer was scale from the start: a large-format national edition, group promotion through MNC's television channels, and, within little more than a year, local editions in the provinces that combined national news with local reporting, rather than a single Jakarta edition shipped around the country.

Format, sections and headquarters

Koran Sindo was a broadsheet. Indonesian sources record a format seven columns wide and 54 centimetres high, with the national edition running to 44 pages in three newspaper sections. A company profile described its sections as including News, Ekonomi, Bisnis, Sports and Lifestyle — news, economy, business, sport and lifestyle — the standard architecture of a general daily, organised so that a reader could move from politics and general news through business coverage to sport and features in one copy.

For most of its life the paper published seven days a week. By the time it stopped publishing, it appeared six times a week, with its weekend edition named Koran Sindo Weekend; it was that weekend edition that became its final issue in April 2023. Its editorial office was in Gedung Sindo on Jalan K. H. Wahid Hasyim in Menteng, Central Jakarta, the MNC news building whose address also served the group's Sindonews operation, with the editorial email address at the MNC Group domain. The paper maintained Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts under the Koran Sindo name alongside its website.

The readers the paper said it was built for

The paper's own reader profile, reproduced in Indonesian academic studies of the title, targeted the middle class and above, readers with bachelor's degrees, in an age segmentation from 18 to 40 years, with a differentiation of 60 per cent male readers and 40 per cent female readers. Its target distribution was the big cities across Indonesia. The same profile material described its readers as people who habitually read more than one newspaper because they did not want to miss important information and entertainment at the same time, characterising them as hungry for information and innovative, and therefore quick to accept new things.

One figure in that profile material put the paper's intended readership at around one million people, while the summary carried on the Indonesian Wikipedia page gives a distribution target of 336,000 readers; the two numbers come from different profile documents and are best understood as the paper's own target claims at different times rather than as audited circulation. A more independent measure came later. According to a 2021 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, 9 per cent of respondents in Indonesia said they got news from Koran Sindo — a modest share that nevertheless placed a print newspaper among the sources a national survey sample still named in the digital era.

Local editions across the provinces

From September 2006, little more than a year after launch, the newspaper began publishing local editions in several provinces, containing both national and local news. The local editions eventually existed in nine provinces, including West Java, North Sumatra, the Riau Islands and South Sulawesi. That structure made Sindo different from a purely Jakarta paper: a reader in Medan or Makassar received the national news of the MNC newsroom together with reporting from their own province, produced by local bureaus.

The bureau network was also the paper's most exposed cost when the print market contracted. In 2017 Indonesian media unions protested against the closure of Koran Sindo bureaus in East Java, Central Java, the Special Region of Yogyakarta, West Java, Medan, Palembang, Manado and Makassar. The local-edition model that had been the paper's route to national reach in 2006 thus became, a decade later, the terrain of its retrenchment, as the group reduced the provincial structure the paper had built.

Becoming Koran Sindo and the Sindo Media family

In 2012 the related news service Sindonews.com was launched; it became one of the most popular websites in the country. In 2013 Harian Seputar Indonesia was renamed Koran Sindo, as part of the rebranding of several MNC Media news assets into the single-brand subsidiary Sindo Media. The Sindo family at that point included the weekly news magazine Sindo Weekly and the news portal Sindonews.com, as well as the television network formerly called Sindo TV, now iNews, and the radio network Sindo Trijaya FM, now MNC Trijaya FM.

The renaming made the newspaper the print bearer of a cross-media brand rather than a newspaper named after a single television programme. From 2020 the paper's own official website, koran-sindo.com, was redirected into the Sindonews.com news portal, so that a reader following the newspaper's web address arrived at the group portal, where Koran Sindo content appeared as an index of posted articles. In 2019 the paper had undergone logo and layout changes, a late redesign of the printed product four years before it closed.

Infographics, awards the paper gave and awards it won

Koran Sindo was known for the infographics shown on its front page, a visual signature in a market where broadsheet front pages were usually dominated by text and photographs. Presenting a story as a front-page graphic suited both its television heritage — a newsroom culture used to explaining stories visually — and its target readership of younger, degree-educated readers. Its company profile also claimed, in the period covered by that profile, that the paper stood third nationally and second in the greater Jakarta area, Jabodetabek; that was the paper's own description of its standing rather than an independent ranking.

The paper also created awards of its own. It initiated People of the Year, given to individuals, and Rekor Bisnis, Business Records, given to companies. Its regular annual agenda, described in company profiles, included the Malam Rekor Bisnis, the Business Records night, as well as a CSR appreciation, an entrepreneur appreciation and People of the Year. The paper was itself a winner at the fifth Indonesia Print Media Awards in 2014 in Bengkulu, where, according to an Indonesian study of the paper citing the awards of the Indonesian Newspaper Publishers Association, SPS, it won six awards for best newspaper front covers, four of them gold and two silver — recognition that matched its reputation for front-page presentation.

Retrenchment and the 2017 labour dispute

By the second half of the 2010s the economics of Indonesian print were turning against daily newspapers, and commentary on the paper's closure later recalled that management had attempted various rescues, including reducing employees, abolishing regional bureaus and limiting print runs, before publication ended. The sharpest public episode came in June 2017, when the Federation of Independent Media Workers' Unions, the Alliance of Independent Journalists and the Press Legal Aid Institute issued a joint statement condemning what they described as unilateral layoffs of Koran Sindo journalists by the MNC Group, connected with the closure of the paper's bureaus.

The unions demanded that PT Media Nusantara Informasi hold bipartite discussions until agreement was reached with the workers, arguing that unilateral termination was unlawful; that if termination was the last resort the company pay severance rights in accordance with Article 156 of the Manpower Law, and that any transfers to other MNC business units respect workers' rights and be agreed by both sides. They also urged the Ministry of Manpower to handle the case directly and the Press Council to actively protect the journalists involved. The dispute showed, six years before the end, the direction of the paper's final years: a shrinking provincial footprint and a workforce being reduced or moved within the group.

Closure in April 2023

On 17 April 2023 it was reported that the paper had ceased publication and laid off all its staff. Its last edition was the weekend edition published on 15 April 2023. Indonesian coverage of the closure placed Koran Sindo in a line of Indonesian print titles that had already stopped, among them Sinar Harapan, Jurnal Nasional, The Jakarta Globe, Tabloid Bola and Koran Tempo, some of which continued online or as e-papers. For Koran Sindo there was no separate print continuation: the name lived on in the group's Sindonews.com portal, to which the paper's website had already been redirected since 2020.

Koran Sindo's eighteen years, from June 2005 to April 2023, covered almost the whole arc of the modern Indonesian newspaper industry: launched with television-group backing into a still-confident print market, expanded through provincial editions, rebranded into a cross-media news family, decorated for its front pages, measured by the Reuters Institute as still reaching a named share of news consumers in 2021, and then closed as the group concentrated its news business online. It remained, to the end, a Jakarta-published national broadsheet whose identity — the Sindo abbreviation, the front-page infographic and the Trusted Source of Reference slogan — came from the broadcast news brand from which it had been born.