About Medan Bisnis

Medan Bisnis

Medan Bisnis was an Indonesian-language economics and business daily newspaper published in Medan, North Sumatra, by PT Kasih Karunia Medan Bisnis. It described itself, and was described in reference works, as the first economics newspaper founded in Medan, and it grew out of the city's legendary Harian Analisa. For roughly two decades it was the specialist business voice in a general-news city, mixing economic reporting with general news, championing small and medium-sized enterprises, and entertaining readers with a cartoon mascot called Mr Hokie. Its print edition closed on 1 April 2019, a casualty of the falling circulation, rising paper costs and shrinking advertising that were reshaping the whole Indonesian newspaper industry.

Origins as Medan's first business newspaper

Sources on the paper's earliest chronology differ slightly in the dates they emphasise, but they agree on the sequence. Reference works date the founding of Medan Bisnis by PT Kasih Karunia Medan Bisnis to 31 July 2000, and describe it as the first business newspaper service established in Medan. A university study of the paper's role in promoting small businesses gives a fuller version: the title first appeared in Medan on 15 January 2001 as a weekly newspaper, and about six months later, on 31 July 2001, its status was raised to that of a daily. Another academic account likewise states that the daily was born from Harian Analisa, the Medan newspaper founded in 1972, and that it was created to examine economic and business questions in depth. The paper was later counted as part of the Analisa group, and studies of North Sumatra media note that Analisa came to acquire Medan Bisnis.

The founding filled a clear gap. Medan was northern Sumatra's trading and plantation metropolis, yet its established dailies — Waspada, Analisa, Sinar Indonesia Baru, Medan Pos and Mimbar Umum — were general newspapers. A title devoted to industry, trade, banking and enterprise gave the city's business community a paper of its own, at a moment when Indonesia was rebuilding its economy after the Asian financial crisis and the political transition of Reformasi.

Growth in pages and colour

The paper's physical growth charted its early success. At the start of publication it appeared with 16 pages a day. As it developed quickly, it increased its pagination to 20 pages from April 2003. From January 2007 it expanded again to 24 pages in full colour, and from 2010 it grew further to 28 pages. Contemporary descriptions of its contents in that period list a wide spread of sections consistent with a 24-page daily: industry, trade, agribusiness, infrastructure, finance and banking, the stock market, business opportunities, the world economy, Aceh business, show business, politics, metropolitan news, law and crime, international news, advertising, miscellany, sport, regional news and general news.

The expansion could not be sustained indefinitely. From the middle of 2018, under pressure from online media, Medan Bisnis cut its pagination back to 16 pages — the size at which it had started. That contraction, described in the small-business study of the paper, mirrors the trajectory of Indonesian print media generally in the late 2010s, as readers and advertisers moved to digital platforms and newspapers trimmed the product that paper costs made expensive to produce.

Editorial policy: half economics, half general news

Medan Bisnis was a business paper with a deliberate balance. Its news composition was 50 percent economic news and 50 percent general news. The policy, documented in a 2018 study of its editorial policy in the journal Persepsi: Communication Journal, was designed so that readers received economics as the main news while also enjoying general coverage of politics, law, crime and human interest. Where possible, even the general stories were to be taken from an economic angle, or from the economic impact of an event. In practice that meant a court case, a political decision or a city incident could be reported through its consequences for trade, prices, employment or business confidence — a house style that kept the paper's identity coherent across all its pages.

The paper's guiding motto expressed the same ambition in broader terms. Its tagline was "Membangun Indonesia Lebih Baik" — building a better Indonesia — rendered in some accounts as "Membangun Indonesia yang Lebih Baik." Academic descriptions of the paper explain that it was expected to provide information that examined economic problems thoroughly in order to help build the nation, delivered factually and in a way that educated its readers. For a regional business daily, the motto staked a claim to a developmental role: economic journalism as a contribution to national progress, not merely as market information for specialists.

Championing small and medium enterprises

The most distinctive service Medan Bisnis offered its city was its sustained attention to usaha mikro, kecil dan menengah — micro, small and medium enterprises, known in Indonesia by the acronym UMKM. In 2010 the paper created a special page, or rubric, devoted to UMKM, and that page endured for the rest of the paper's life. It was created specifically to discuss issues affecting small and medium businesses in Indonesia and especially in Medan, with the stated intention of reviving and strengthening the city's business world.

Research on the paper's promotional role records the mechanism and its claimed effect. The UMKM page profiled local entrepreneurs and their products, and the page's editor told researchers that many business owners whose profiles had appeared in Medan Bisnis subsequently experienced growth in their businesses. Whether through publicity, credibility or new customers, a profile in the city's business paper functioned as a form of promotion that small firms could not easily buy. The arrangement also suited the newspaper: small businesses were its natural readership and its natural advertisers, and a page that helped them grow helped bind them to the paper. The UMKM rubric is therefore remembered as the clearest practical expression of the paper's founding motto.

Mr Hokie, the cartoon mascot

Medan Bisnis had a lighter emblem as well. The newspaper's cartoon mascot was named Mr Hokie, and he was created by a young cartoonist, Ilham Moehammad, commonly called Ilmoe. A mascot of that kind gave a business newspaper — a genre that can appear dry to general readers — a recognisable and approachable face. Mr Hokie belongs to a wider Medan tradition of newspaper cartoon characters: the city's Analisa was famous for its Pak Tuntung feature. In adopting a mascot of its own, Medan Bisnis signalled that economic news in Medan was meant for the whole reading public, not only for bankers and executives.

Place among North Sumatra's mainstream newspapers

Within its home market, Medan Bisnis was counted among the mainstream. A study of press freedom and Islamic politics in North Sumatra during the Reformasi period lists the province's mainstream newspapers as Waspada, Analisa, Sinar Indonesia Baru, Medan Pos and Mimbar Umum, and records Analisa's acquisition of Medan Bisnis as part of that landscape. The paper's editorials carried enough weight to be studied alongside those of the big general dailies: a critical discourse analysis of Medan newspaper editorials from June to December 2012 analysed Medan Bisnis together with Analisa, Andalas, Orbit, Sinar Indonesia Baru and Waspada, examining how the six papers addressed politics, officials and social phenomena. Its usefulness to researchers continued after its closure, with studies of its economic terminology, its editorial policy and its support for small businesses preserving a detailed record of how it worked.

The road to closure

The forces that ended Medan Bisnis are documented with unusual clarity. A study of headline strategy and news selection by North Sumatra editorial teams, drawing on the history of the province's press, records that Medan Bisnis, published by PT Kasih Kurnia Medan Bisnis with an economic and business segmentation and counted as part of the Analisa group, closed on 1 April 2019. The causes it gives are a declining circulation that no longer generated profit and made it impossible to raise the selling price; paper prices that rose year after year and swelled production costs; and advertising revenue that did not match those costs. The same study places the closure in a sequence of North Sumatra print failures driven by the rise of online media.

A 2019 survey of Medan's city press told the same story from inside the market. It listed Medan Bisnis among the Medan dailies that had closed — "tutup" — in a table where the surviving titles were themselves described as persisting in a sick condition, with very little daily advertising. Its analysis was blunt: a print newspaper cannot live normally without advertising income, advertisers were moving to digital media, and even Medan's two largest papers had seen their advertising fall sharply. Medan Bisnis, as a specialist title in a provincial market, had less room to absorb that shock than the big general dailies.

Legacy

Medan Bisnis was Medan's pioneering business newspaper: the first economics title founded in the city, born from Harian Analisa at the start of the 2000s, grown from 16 pages to a 28-page full-colour daily at its height, and guided by a policy of half economics and half general news taken, wherever possible, from an economic angle. It gave North Sumatra's traders, bankers and entrepreneurs a paper organised around their concerns, gave the city's small businesses a dedicated UMKM page from 2010 that actively promoted them, and gave its readers Mr Hokie as a friendly face for economic news. Its closure on 1 April 2019, after circulation, paper costs and advertising turned decisively against it, marked the end of Medan's experiment with a stand-alone daily business press — and it remains a well-documented case study of both the ambition and the economics of regional specialist newspapers in Reformasi-era Indonesia.