About Radar Mojokerto

Radar Mojokerto

Radar Mojokerto is an Indonesian-language daily newspaper published in Mojokerto, East Java, Indonesia, as part of the Jawa Pos Group. Its full name in the Jawa Pos style is Jawa Pos Radar Mojokerto, often shortened to JPRM. The paper is published by PT Mojokerto Intermedia Pers and serves the city of Mojokerto, Mojokerto Regency and, for most of its history, Jombang Regency to the west. First published on 1 March 2001, it is one of the locally edited Radar editions of the Jawa Pos News Network, combining the national reporting of the Surabaya flagship Jawa Pos with its own newsroom's coverage of the Mojokerto area. It appears in print each morning and online through the Jawa Pos digital network.

Founding on 1 March 2001

The history of Radar Mojokerto is documented in unusual detail in internship and marketing reports written about its Jombang subsidiary and held in Indonesian academic repositories. According to those company histories, Jawa Pos Radar Mojokerto was first published on 1 March 2001, with a working territory covering Mojokerto Regency, Mojokerto City and Jombang Regency. The paper grew out of the Jawa Pos bureau system: a Jombang bureau of Jawa Pos had existed since 1994, and when Jawa Pos Radar Kediri was established in mid-1999, Jombang fell under the Kediri paper's regional coordination and the bureau worked for Radar Kediri. When Radar Mojokerto was created two years later, the Jombang bureau was withdrawn from Kediri and joined the new paper.

The new daily's first general manager was Dyah Indra Tjahyani, who held the post on an interim basis for three months. She was succeeded by Abdul Choliq, who served as general manager until the end of 2003 and was then appointed, at the start of 2004, as director of PT Mojokerto Intermedia Pers, the paper's publishing company. The sequence shows the Radar model maturing: what began as an edition run from Surabaya quickly acquired its own company, its own director and its own commercial operation in Mojokerto.

The founding date is corroborated by the paper's own celebrations. On Monday 1 March 2021, Radar Mojokerto marked its twentieth anniversary at its office on Jalan RA Basuni in Jampirogo, Sooko, Mojokerto Regency, an event reported by the Mojokerto city government's own media. The mayor of Mojokerto, Ika Puspitasari, told the gathering that twenty years was a mature age for a print medium and set the paper three tasks for the future: to strengthen its educational and promotional function for central and regional government programmes, to maintain its function of control over regional government policy, and above all to educate the public. She pointed to vaccination reporting during the pandemic as an example of the media's strategic role in giving the public correct information at a time when true and false news arrived indistinguishably on everyone's phone.

Leadership and company development

The company histories trace the paper's leadership across its first two decades. Abdul Choliq, its first director, was transferred at the beginning of 2010 to Jawa Pos Radar Banyuwangi, one of several examples of Jawa Pos moving experienced Radar managers between its East Java titles. His successor as general manager was Sri Widji Wahyuning Utami, who served until the end of 2011. The leadership then passed to Andung Achmad Kurniawan, who served as director until June 2020.

By 2022 the director was M. Nur Kholis. He appears in that role receiving the Mojokerto City police chief and his officers at the paper's office in August 2022, and again in March 2024, when he stated that the paper's online edition, radarmojokerto.jawapos.com, was reaching about 400,000 page views a month while its printed circulation remained strong across Jombang, Mojokerto City and Mojokerto Regency. That pairing, a director reporting a healthy print sale alongside a growing digital audience, sums up the paper's position in the 2020s: a print-born local daily whose centre of gravity is slowly shifting online without abandoning the printed edition.

The paper's office, repeatedly identified in reports of official visits, stands at Jalan RA Basuni No. 96 in Jampirogo village, Sooko subdistrict, Mojokerto Regency. It is there that the paper receives the region's officials: the Mojokerto City police chief's media coffee morning in 2022, the mayor's anniversary visit in 2021 and other civic callers were all hosted at the RA Basuni office, which functions as one of the recognised meeting points between the press and the state in Mojokerto.

The Jombang chapter

For its first fifteen years, Radar Mojokerto's territory included Jombang, the regency west of Mojokerto famous for its pesantren, its Islamic boarding schools. The company histories record how the relationship evolved. The Jombang bureau dated to 1994, worked for Radar Kediri after 1999 and joined Radar Mojokerto in 2001. As Radar Mojokerto grew significantly, the Jawa Pos parent judged that the Jombang bureau had the potential to stand alone. On 2 June 2014 the Jombang segment received its own special pages, three pages of its own within the paper, a date later adopted as the anniversary of Jawa Pos Radar Jombang. Finally, on 1 January 2016, Radar Jombang separated formally from Radar Mojokerto and became an independent title under PT Jombang Intermedia Pers.

The episode is instructive about the Jawa Pos system. Radar territories were not fixed; a bureau that proved its market graduated first to dedicated pages and then to a masthead of its own, while the parent Radar, in this case Mojokerto, continued with its core territory. Radar Mojokerto's own identity was correspondingly sharpened by the separation: from 2016 it was, unambiguously, the newspaper of Mojokerto city and regency.

Place within the Jawa Pos Group

Radar Mojokerto's parent, Jawa Pos, was first published in Surabaya on 1 July 1949 by Suseno Tedjo, known as The Chung Shen. After declining to about 6,000 copies a day, it was sold in 1982 to PT Grafiti Pers, whose Eric Samola appointed Dahlan Iskan to lead it; circulation rose above 300,000 copies and the group built the Jawa Pos News Network, reported in 2010 as Indonesia's largest media chain with about 140 titles and 20 television stations. The headquarters tower, Graha Pena in Surabaya, was completed in 1997.

In the network's East Java structure, a Jawa Pos company history lists fifteen Radar editions, each with its own newsroom, and summarises Radar Mojokerto in a single line: based in Mojokerto city, circulating in Mojokerto and Jombang. The local section replaces the flagship's metropolitan section, so Mojokerto readers receive Jawa Pos national and sports reporting wrapped around pages written in Mojokerto about Mojokerto, carrying Mojokerto advertising. Radar Mojokerto, launched in 2001, belongs to the second wave of that system, following the 1999 East Java launches, and its 2014 to 2016 incubation of Radar Jombang shows the system reproducing itself.

The territory: Mojokerto and Majapahit

Mojokerto's claim on Indonesia's historical imagination is unmatched among Radar territories. In Trowulan subdistrict of Mojokerto Regency lies the archaeological site of Trowulan, covering roughly 100 square kilometres, which scholars identify as the capital city of the Majapahit Empire, described by the court poet Mpu Prapanca in the fourteenth-century Nagarakretagama. Excavations have found temples, tombs, bathing places and the remains of industrial, commercial and residential districts and water systems, evidence of a densely populated city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The capital was razed in 1478, after which Majapahit's centre moved to Daha, in present-day Kediri. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who reported the ruins in the nineteenth century, called Trowulan the pride of Java, and in October 2009 Indonesia submitted the site for the UNESCO World Heritage list. The Trowulan Museum displays the finds on the west side of the Segaran pool.

For Radar Mojokerto, this heritage is living news: heritage preservation, tourism development, museum affairs and the disputes that accompany building on archaeologically rich land are part of its regular agenda. Around the heritage core sits a working regency and city on the Brantas river plain, roughly sixty kilometres from Surabaya, with manufacturing, trade and agriculture, and, in the south, the slopes of Mount Penanggungan, where the paper has reported, for example, on official inspections of illegal sand and stone mining below the mountain and the villagers who confronted the inspectors. The neighbouring regency of Jombang, long part of the paper's world, adds the pesantren culture of Tebuireng and Denanyar to the cultural hinterland its journalists know well.

Editorial content and public role

Radar Mojokerto is a general daily in Indonesian. Its reporting covers Mojokerto city and regency government, the regency parliament, police and courts, local business, education, religion, health and community life, together with the Jawa Pos national report. The mayor's 2021 anniversary speech usefully summarised the functions the city expects of it: education, promotion of public programmes, and control, meaning scrutiny, of regional government policy. Local newspapers in Indonesia are routinely described in these terms, but in Mojokerto the expectation was delivered in person, at the paper's own office, by the city's chief executive.

Relations with local institutions

The paper's relationship with local institutions is also visible in events such as the August 2022 Piramida programme, the East Java police's coffee-with-media initiative, hosted at the RA Basuni office. The Mojokerto City police chief, AKBP Wiwit Adisatria, told the paper's directors that he had learned to read by spelling out the Jawa Pos newspaper to which his father subscribed, and that he still did not eat before reading Jawa Pos; Radar Mojokerto's director M. Nur Kholis responded that such loyalty was a vitamin for the paper's journalists. The anecdote captures the intergenerational place of the Jawa Pos name in East Javanese households, on which each Radar title draws.

Print and digital presence

Like its sister papers, Radar Mojokerto maintains social media channels, including an Instagram account under the name radar_mojokerto whose following a third-party tracker has counted in six figures, and distributes its reporting through the Jawa Pos online network, where its own reporting put the audience at about 400,000 page views a month in 2024. Its online stories follow the standard Radar pattern of publication through the day, ahead of the following morning's printed edition.

Significance

Radar Mojokerto illustrates the second phase of the Jawa Pos local revolution. The 1999 titles occupied the big East Java markets; the 2001 Mojokerto launch showed the model reaching smaller cities, and doing so successfully enough that its western bureau could be spun off as Radar Jombang fifteen years later. Its documented history (founding date, first managers, company formation, territorial evolution) is fuller than that of many Indonesian local papers because its own subsidiaries' records were studied by Indonesian academics.

The paper's territory gives it a distinctive brief. No other Radar daily reports daily on the capital of Majapahit, the empire Indonesians regard as a forerunner of the nation, while also covering the ordinary business of a modern regency: budgets, roads, schools, mining disputes and football. That combination of deep heritage and everyday local government is the essence of the Radar proposition, and Radar Mojokerto has carried it, in print and online, since 1 March 2001.