About Portibi

Portibi

Portibi is an Indonesian-language general daily newspaper published in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, Indonesia. It has been published since 17 August 2001, under editor-in-chief Manahan Lubis, and it appears daily with 12 pages. Its name is one of the most evocative in the Indonesian regional press: Portibi is the Batak pronunciation of Pertiwi, from the Sanskrit Prithvi, the name of the earth goddess — a word meaning the earth or the world. Academic studies of the Medan press record Portibi as one of the city's newspapers that succeeded in surviving in print form, in a market where many of its contemporaries closed.

A name drawn from Sanskrit and Batak

The name Portibi comes from the Batak language, and ultimately from Sanskrit. It is the Batak rendering of the word Pertiwi — Pritvi, or Prithvi, in India — the earth goddess of Hindu tradition, and in Batak usage the word means the world or the earth. For a general newspaper, the name therefore carried an expansive claim: a paper named for the earth itself, addressed to the whole world its readers inhabited, rather than to one trade, party or community within it.

The same name is woven into the geography of North Sumatra. Portibi is also a place name in the south of the province: a district in North Padang Lawas Regency, a village area at Bahal, and the name associated with the ancient temple complex there. The Candi Bahal temples, also known as Candi Portibi or Biaro Bahal, are a group of Vajrayana Buddhist temples of red brick in Bahal village, in the Portibi area of Padang Lawas, some 400 kilometres from Medan. The complex, comprising Bahal I, Bahal II and Bahal III and dated to around the eleventh century, is linked to the kingdom of Pannai, a port within the mandala of Srivijaya on the Strait of Malacca. Reference works on the temple explain its name in exactly the same way as the newspaper's: Portibi in Batak means world or earth, a loanword from the Sanskrit Pertiwi, the earth goddess. The word is also used as a street name in the Portibi area of Bahal village. A Medan newspaper carrying that name thus tied itself, linguistically, to one of the oldest layers of Sumatran civilisation — the Hindu-Buddhist heritage of Padang Lawas — and to the Batak-speaking south of its own province.

Publication since 2001

Portibi has been published since 17 August 2001, with Manahan Lubis as its editor-in-chief. The year of its birth places it in the first wave of Reformasi-era newspaper founding in Indonesia. After 1998, the loosening of press licensing allowed new titles to appear across the country, and Medan — already one of Indonesia's great newspaper cities — saw a series of new dailies launched in the early 2000s to compete with its long-established papers. Portibi was one of those entrants, and unlike many Reformasi-era start-ups across Indonesia, it established a durable place for itself in its home market.

The newspaper is a general daily — a surat kabar harian umum — rather than a specialist title. Where its Medan contemporary Medan Bisnis organised itself around economics, and others around crime or politics, Portibi addressed the general reader with the standard full diet of a regional daily. It publishes every day, and its print edition runs to 12 pages.

The 12-page paper and its advertising base

The most concrete picture of Portibi as a working newspaper comes from academic study of Medan's press in the digital era. A 2019 article in the journal Komunika Islamika, "Surat Kabar Kota Medan Era 4.0" (Medan City Newspapers in the 4.0 Era), tabulated the print dailies then publishing in the city, recording each paper's page count and the volume of advertising it carried per day. In that table, Portibi appears as a 12-page newspaper with advertising occupying about a quarter of the newspaper — described in the study's summary as advertising sponsorship amounting to one quarter of the paper's total pages, in an edition of twelve pages.

The same table allows Portibi to be measured against its Medan competitors. Analisa, the market's heavyweight, appeared with 20 pages and three pages of advertising a day; Waspada had 16 pages and half a page of advertising; Tribun Medan had 20 pages and one and a half pages of advertising; Sumut Pos had 16 pages and one page. Portibi, at 12 pages with a quarter-page share of advertising in the daily sample, belonged to a group of compact Medan titles — alongside Mimbar Umum, Pos Metro Medan, Andalas and Metro 24, all also listed at 12 pages — that operated on a smaller scale than the market leaders but continued to publish. Below them in the same study stood a further group of Medan papers carrying no advertising at all in the sample, and a long list of titles marked simply "tutup": closed.

Survival in a contracting market

That context is what makes Portibi's record notable. The 2019 study presented Medan's newspaper industry as an industry in severe difficulty. New media and social media had drawn away readers; more importantly, they had drawn away advertising, the income the study identified as the one thing that keeps a print newspaper alive. Papers that could not attract advertising could not guarantee the welfare of their staff, could not run their editorial and company management properly, and ultimately could not sustain quality journalism or readers. The study's list of closed Medan newspapers ran to a dozen titles, including Sumatera, Sindo Medan, Batak Pos, Jurnal Medan, Berita Medan and Medan Bisnis.

Against that background, the study explicitly identified Portibi as one of the media that endured in the form of a printed newspaper, supported by its advertising. Survival, for a 12-page independent general daily in a market dominated by historic titles and national groups, was itself an achievement of management as much as of journalism: keeping a daily printing schedule, a staff and a readership while larger or better-known competitors disappeared. Portibi's presence in the Indonesian list of regional newspapers currently in print confirms that standing: it is catalogued among the Sumatra titles of Indonesia's regional press, alongside its Medan neighbours.

Medan, the city it serves

Portibi's reporting ground is Medan and North Sumatra. Medan is the largest city on the island of Sumatra and one of Indonesia's oldest newspaper centres: its press history runs from the colonial-era Malay and Dutch papers of the east-coast plantation belt, through pioneering titles such as Pewarta Deli, to the post-independence dailies Mimbar Umum and Waspada, founded in the 1940s, and Analisa, founded in 1972. Studies of the province's mainstream press describe a market structured by those historic titles and, later, by editions of national groups such as Jawa Pos and Kompas Gramedia. A general daily founded in 2001 entered that field as a challenger, competing for the same civic agenda — city and provincial government, law, business, religion, sport and community life — in a province of many peoples, including Malay, Batak, Chinese-Indonesian, Javanese and Minangkabau communities.

The paper's name itself speaks to that province. The Batak languages are the heritage languages of much of inland North Sumatra, and the Lubis name of its editor-in-chief belongs to the Mandailing-Angkola Batak world of the province's south — the same southern region, around Padang Lawas and Padangsidimpuan, where the Portibi temple country lies and where the word Portibi is a living place name. Without overstating what the record shows, the choice of a Batak-Sanskrit word meaning "the earth" gave a Medan daily a title rooted in North Sumatran language and history rather than in the vocabulary of Jakarta journalism.

Portibi in the record of Indonesian newspapers

Portibi's documentary footprint is modest beside that of Indonesia's national dailies, and that modesty is itself typical of the country's surviving independent regional press. It is recorded in the national inventory of Indonesian newspapers as a regional daily of Sumatra; it has its own entry in Indonesian reference works, which preserve its founding date, its editor-in-chief, its page count and the origin of its name; and it appears as data in peer-reviewed study of the Medan press, where its 12 pages and its advertising base were measured against every competitor in its city. Those records are the means by which the history of Indonesia's regional press is reconstructed, title by title.

An Indonesian-language general daily

Portibi publishes in Indonesian, the national language and the common language of the Indonesian press. That choice is the standard one for a general daily in a multilingual province: North Sumatra's readers speak Batak languages, Malay, Javanese, Minangkabau and other languages at home, but Indonesian is the language of schooling, government and inter-ethnic public life, and it is the language in which a newspaper can address the whole of Medan at once. The paper's identity is therefore double in a way that is characteristic of Indonesia's regional press. Its name speaks in a local, Batak-derived word, rooted in Sanskrit and in the temple country of the province's south, while its pages speak in the national language to a general readership that crosses every community in the city. It is catalogued in reference works precisely in those terms, as an Indonesian-language general daily newspaper of Medan.

As a general daily, Portibi also belongs to a specific category in the Indonesian newspaper inventory: the surat kabar harian umum, the general daily that appears in the regional lists alongside national general papers, national business papers and the network editions of groups such as Jawa Pos and Tribun. In the Sumatra section of that inventory, Portibi is listed among the regional titles based in the island's cities, in the company of Medan's other dailies and of the provincial papers of Aceh, Riau, Jambi, West Sumatra, South Sumatra and Lampung. That listing is a small but telling piece of recognition: in the formal geography of the Indonesian press, Portibi is one of the fixed points of Sumatra.

Legacy and standing

Portibi stands in the record as a Reformasi-era Medan daily that made a durable home in a difficult market. Founded on 17 August 2001 under Manahan Lubis, publishing every day in 12 pages, and sustained by the advertising that the academic literature identifies as the lifeblood of print, it survived in newspaper form through a period in which a dozen of its Medan contemporaries closed. Its name — the Batak form of Pertiwi, the Sanskrit earth — connects a modern city newspaper to the temple landscapes of Padang Lawas and to the linguistic heritage of North Sumatra. For readers of Medan, Portibi is one of the compact, independent general dailies that kept the city's centuries-old tradition of a plural, competitive local press alive into the digital age.