About Radar Solo

Radar Solo

Radar Solo is an Indonesian-language daily newspaper published in Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, as the Solo edition of the Jawa Pos Group. It is the Jawa Pos network's own newspaper for the city of Surakarta, universally known as Solo, and for the wider Solo Raya region around it. The paper combines the national and international reporting of its Surabaya-based parent, Jawa Pos, with locally gathered news from Surakarta and its neighbouring regencies, produced by its own local newsroom. Radar Solo is published by PT Surakarta Intermedia Pers and appears in print each day alongside a digital edition on the Jawa Pos online network.

The newspaper should not be confused with Solopos, the other well-known daily serving the same city. Academic research on media ownership in Surakarta identifies the two titles as products of rival groups: Solopos is published by PT Aksara Solopos, linked to the Bisnis Indonesia group, while Radar Solo is owned by PT Surakarta Intermedia Pers and belongs to the Jawa Pos media group. The two papers compete directly for readers and advertisers in the same market, and studies of the Surakarta press have treated them as the city's two representative local dailies.

Origins in the Jawa Pos expansion into Central Java

Radar Solo grew out of the Jawa Pos group's push into Central Java in the late 1990s. According to a company-profile study of the paper, Jawa Pos first entered Central Java at the beginning of 1997 with an initial circulation of around 5,000 copies, which rose within a year to about 80,000 copies. Jawa Pos chief executive Dahlan Iskan judged that a circulation of that size in the province could sustain a newspaper of its own, and the idea of a Central Java title, provisionally called Jateng Pos, was considered.

In May 2000, Dahlan Iskan decided instead to expand more deeply by penetrating the market in three large cities at once: Solo, Yogyakarta and Semarang. The reasoning recorded in the company profile was twofold. A separate edition for each city could carry far more local news from its own area, and the arrangement fitted the spirit of press autonomy in the regional-autonomy era that followed Indonesia's reformasi. The Jateng Pos idea was therefore dropped and Jawa Pos appeared in the province as three separate Radar editions: Radar Solo, Radar Jogja and Radar Semarang. The Jawa Pos Group's own listing of its titles dates Radar Solo to 7 May 2000.

The strategy was quickly reflected in sales. The same company-profile study records combined circulation of 95,000 copies for the three editions in 2001, broken down as about 30,000 copies for Radar Solo, 25,000 for Radar Jogja and 45,000 for Radar Semarang. Those figures are historical snapshots from the paper's own institutional history rather than current sales, but they show that the Solo edition established a substantial readership within its first two years.

Publishing company and licence

The company-profile study states that Radar Solo is published by PT Surakarta Intermedia Pers under publishing licence SIUPP No. 1240/SK/Menpen/SIUPP/1999, the licence predating the edition's 2000 launch as the legal groundwork for the Jawa Pos group's Central Java expansion was laid. A study published in Jurnal Komunikasi, the journal of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, likewise identifies Radar Solo as owned by PT Surakarta Intermedia Pers and as part of the Jawa Pos media group.

The study also describes the paper's early home: the Radar Solo office stood together with the printing plant of PT Nyata Grafika on a site of about 10,100 square metres at Jalan Adi Sumarmo 138, Kartasura, on the western side of Surakarta. Co-locating the editorial office with a printing works fitted the Jawa Pos model of the period, in which each regional centre combined reporting, production and distribution under one roof so that the morning paper could be printed close to its market. Printing capacity in Solo was later reinforced at group level: the group's printing subsidiary Temprina Media Grafika, one of the largest users of Goss presses in the world, added a six-tower Community SSC press in Solo City to provide more sections and increased colour for the growing Jawa Pos titles.

Place within the Jawa Pos Group

To understand Radar Solo it is necessary to understand its parent. Jawa Pos itself was first published in Surabaya on 1 July 1949 by Suseno Tedjo, also known as The Chung Shen, under names that evolved from Java Post through Djawa Post and Djawa Pos to the modern Jawa Pos. By the late 1970s the paper was in decline, and in 1982, with daily circulation down to roughly 6,000 copies, it was sold to PT Grafiti Pers, the publisher of Tempo magazine. Grafiti's Eric Samola appointed Dahlan Iskan, then Tempo's East Java bureau chief, to run it.

Under Dahlan Iskan the flagship's circulation climbed past 300,000 copies within the decade, and the company built the Jawa Pos News Network, described by the Pacific Media Centre as the largest media chain in Indonesia, with around 140 titles and 20 television stations reported in 2010 and more than 150 local newspapers reported in later industry accounts. The Radar papers are the local layer of that network. In the Jawa Pos system, the Surabaya flagship supplies the main national news section and the sports section, while each Radar newsroom replaces the metropolitan section with its own local section carrying its city's news and local advertising. Radar Solo is the Solo application of that model: a national newspaper's resources behind a newsroom whose first loyalty is to one city region.

The group is headquartered at Graha Pena in Surabaya, a 21-storey tower completed in 1997, and the flagship's motto, Selalu Ada yang Baru, meaning there is always something new, expresses the restless, youth-oriented editorial culture that Dahlan Iskan built. That culture produced DetEksi, the group's daily youth section launched in 2000, and Jawa Pos was named World Young Reader Newspaper of the Year by WAN-IFRA in 2011 for its work engaging young readers. Radar editions, including Radar Solo, operate inside that wider group culture while writing for their own local audiences.

Coverage area: Solo Raya

Radar Solo's home territory is Solo Raya, the metropolitan region also known by the acronym Subosukawonosraten, formed from the names of its seven constituent areas: the city of Surakarta and the regencies of Boyolali, Sukoharjo, Karanganyar, Wonogiri, Sragen and Klaten. The region corresponds to the former Surakarta residency and remains a single cultural and economic space, whose residents are collectively described as wong Solo, the people of Solo. The newspaper's own institutional reporting describes its home market as the city of Solo, and its 2025 education awards were explicitly framed as serving the Solo Raya region.

That regional brief gives the paper a varied news agenda. Surakarta itself contributes city government, the two royal courts, universities, batik trading and urban services. The surrounding regencies add industry in Sukoharjo, dairy farming and the Merapi and Merbabu slopes in Boyolali, tea estates and mountain tourism around Tawangmangu in Karanganyar, agriculture in Wonogiri and Sragen, and the temples and spring pools of Klaten. A Radar Solo reporter can therefore be covering a palace ceremony in the morning and a factory or farm story in a neighbouring regency the same day, and the paper's identity rests on treating those places as one community of readers.

The city it serves

Surakarta is one of Java's two historic royal capitals. The Keraton Kasunanan Surakarta Hadiningrat was founded in 1745 when Pakubuwono II moved the Mataram court to the village of Sala on the Bengawan Solo river, and after the Treaty of Salatiga the city gained a second court, Pura Mangkunegaran, established in 1757. Both palaces remain living institutions, and court ceremonies, successions and palace heritage projects are recurring subjects of local reporting; Radar Solo's recent coverage, for example, has followed the revitalisation of the Keraton's western quarter, an area dating from the era of Pakubuwono X.

Solo is also regarded as a cradle of batik. The craft is centred on the Laweyan and Kauman batik districts, traded through Pasar Klewer, described as Indonesia's largest textile market, and celebrated since UNESCO recognised Indonesian batik as part of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2009. Gamelan music, wayang kulit shadow puppetry, traditional markets such as Pasar Gede and events including the Solo Batik Carnival and the Sekaten festival complete a cultural calendar that gives a Solo newspaper a steady diet of arts and heritage stories alongside politics and economics. The wider region adds the Sangiran early-man site in Sragen, a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for Homo erectus fossils, to the paper's heritage beat.

Editorial content and reporting

As a Jawa Pos Radar title, Radar Solo is written in Indonesian and built around local news: city and regency government, elections, courts and crime, education, health, business, religion, culture and sport, framed by the parent paper's national and world reporting. Its journalists work to the daily rhythm of a morning newspaper, with the local section planned around what has happened in Solo Raya since the previous edition.

The paper's reporting has attracted academic attention. A critical-discourse study published by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia analysed how Radar Solo and Solopos covered the 2020 Surakarta mayoral election, taking as one example Radar Solo's front-page report of Saturday 26 September 2020 comparing the declared assets of candidates Gibran Rakabuming, at Rp21 billion, and Bagyo Wahyono, at Rp1.9 billion. The researchers concluded that Radar Solo deliberately foregrounded the wealth story because its core market was the city of Solo and its readers needed election information. A 2025 study from Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta examined spelling and language errors in Jawa Pos Radar Solo's online news against the Indonesian spelling standard PUEBI, treating the paper as an established local medium with a responsibility for language quality. A further international study of local hybrid newspapers used Radar Solo, alongside Radar Surabaya and Radar Yogya, as a case study of how Indonesian local papers combine print and digital forms.

Digital presence

Radar Solo publishes online as part of the jawapos.com network, under its own Radar Solo section, where stories appear through the day ahead of the following morning's print edition. Like other Jawa Pos titles it also maintains social media channels under the Radar Solo name, including video platforms where its reports are repackaged for younger audiences who may never buy the printed paper. The hybrid print-digital pattern documented by researchers means the same newsroom feeds the printed daily, the website and social accounts, with online publication no longer waiting for the print deadline.

The group's investment in printing in Solo, described above, shows the other side of the strategy: print remained important enough in Central Java for the group printer to install additional press capacity in the city even as the digital audience grew. Radar Solo therefore sits between two eras of Indonesian journalism, a printed morning paper rooted in the Jawa Pos expansion of 2000 and a continuously updated digital service carrying the same name.

Community role and recognition

Local Radar papers are expected by their group to be civic institutions in their cities, not only news vendors, and Radar Solo's recent activity fits that pattern. In 2025 the paper presented its Education Award to education figures in the Solo Raya region. Its director, Resita Rika Ariyani, described the award as appreciation for people who had made real contributions to advancing education in Solo Raya, saying the event was a space to honour the warriors of education who light candles of hope every day in classrooms, on campuses and in communities, and that assessment was based on what was real rather than on polished reports. Jawa Pos Media director Marsudi Nur Wahid attended the same event and praised Radar Solo for consistently providing a platform recognising achievement in education.

Such awards, school and campus partnerships and coverage of community events are part of how the paper maintains the local presence on which its advertising and circulation depend. In a market where it competes with Solopos, with national online portals and with social media, Radar Solo's claim on readers is proximity: it argues, in effect, that no national outlet will cover a Solo school, a Karanganyar village or a Surakarta court story with the same attention.

Significance

Radar Solo is a representative product of the Jawa Pos revolution in Indonesian regional journalism. Before the Radar network, provincial readers were typically served by a Surabaya or Jakarta paper with a thin local page; the Radar model inverted that relationship by giving each city region its own masthead, newsroom, printing base and advertising market while keeping the economies of scale of a national group. The May 2000 three-city launch that created Radar Solo, Radar Jogja and Radar Semarang was one of the clearest expressions of that model, and the Solo edition's recorded 30,000-copy sale in 2001 showed the demand it tapped.

A quarter of a century after its launch, the paper continues to publish in print and online for a region whose identity, as the former Surakarta residency and a centre of Javanese court culture, is unusually strong. Its history, from the 1997 Jawa Pos entry into Central Java through the 2000 split into city editions to its present multiplatform form, mirrors the wider story of Indonesia's local press in the reformasi era: decentralised, competitive and increasingly digital, but still organised around the life of a particular place.