About Radar Sulteng

Radar Sulteng

Radar Sulteng is an Indonesian-language daily newspaper published in Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi, by PT Radar Sulteng Membangun under the Jawa Pos Group. For most of its life it was known in the province simply as the Jawa Pos daily for Central Sulawesi, described by The Jakarta Post in 2005 as Central Sulawesi's biggest daily and by researchers at Universitas Tadulako as one of the barometers of news in the province. In 2025, after almost a quarter of a century, the company announced that the daily would be relaunched under the name Radar Palu, keeping the Radar identity shared by Jawa Pos local newspapers while adopting the name of its home city. This profile covers the newspaper under the name it carried for the great majority of its history, Radar Sulteng, and records the renaming as the latest chapter of that history.

Roots in the Mercusuar cooperation

Radar Sulteng's origins are intertwined with Mercusuar, Central Sulawesi's oldest newspaper, which was connected to the Muhammadiyah movement. Research on the history of the press in Central Sulawesi records that Jawa Pos, under Dahlan Iskan, sought to establish a newspaper in the province and chose cooperation with Mercusuar because the local paper already held a publishing licence, a SIUPP, while Jawa Pos brought professional management; the two sides agreed a fifty-fifty cooperation that ran from 1993 to 2001, during which the name Radar Sulteng was born as the joint paper's identity. After Indonesia's Press Law No. 40 of 1999 abolished the licence requirement, differences in management principle emerged between the partners, and in 2001 the two media agreed to separate, with journalists choosing whether to build their careers with Mercusuar or with Radar Sulteng under Jawa Pos. In March 2002 Radar Sulteng formed its own company, PT Radar Sulteng Membangun, ending the corporate link with Mercusuar's publisher while both papers continued as Palu's rival dailies.

Establishment as a daily

Research published in Kinesik, the journal of the communication science programme at Universitas Tadulako in Palu, dates the establishment of Harian Umum Radar Sulteng, the Radar Sulteng daily newspaper, under the Jawa Pos Group to 28 October 2003. The same research describes the mature form of the paper: a sixteen-page daily sold at five thousand rupiah a copy at the time of the study, opening with a front page carrying the editorial team's chosen headline of the day, and including the rubric Palu Rumah Kita, meaning Palu Our Home, which had earlier been called Palu Kota Teluk, presenting news of the movement and life of the city of Palu across a variety of themes. Other academic comparisons of Palu's press have placed Radar Sulteng alongside Mercusuar as one of the two most established and liked newspapers among Central Sulawesi readers, with its own distinct editorial character: where Mercusuar's presentation leaned towards public service material shaped by its ownership history, researchers characterised Radar Sulteng's coverage as more oriented to developing news and current phenomena as they unfolded.

The Jawa Pos Group and the Radar system

Radar Sulteng is one of the local newspapers through which the Jawa Pos Group built the largest newspaper network in Indonesia. The parent paper, Jawa Pos, was founded in Surabaya on 1 July 1949 by The Chung Shen, also known as Suseno Tedjo, declined to near-bankruptcy by 1982, and was then bought by PT Grafiti Pers and rebuilt by Dahlan Iskan into one of the country's largest-selling dailies, with a chain of regional titles, many of them named Pos or Radar, spreading across the archipelago. Some accounts of the network describe Radar Sulteng as a subsidiary within the group's eastern Indonesia operations and a member of the Jawa Pos News Network. For Palu, group membership brought professional management systems, printing and distribution standards and a national news supply to a provincial market that had previously been served only by locally owned titles. It also made Radar Sulteng part of a recognisable national family: the Radar name on its masthead signalled to readers, advertisers and officials that the Palu daily belonged to the same network as the Radar newspapers of Java and the Pos newspapers of eastern Indonesia.

Palu and Central Sulawesi, its territory

The newspaper's home is Palu, a city set at the head of a long, narrow bay on the west coast of Central Sulawesi, and its territory is the whole province: a mountainous, earthquake-prone region of regencies including Sigi, Donggala, Parigi Moutong, Poso, Tojo Una-Una, Morowali, Banggai and the Banggai islands, among others. Central Sulawesi's people include the Kaili, the province's largest indigenous group centred on the Palu valley, alongside Bugis, Gorontalo and many migrant communities, and its public life is shaped by farming, fishing, mining and plantations, by the legacy of the Poso conflict around the turn of the century, and by powerful religious institutions, above all Alkhairaat, the Islamic organisation founded in Palu whose schools and clerics are central to the province's society. A provincial daily based in Palu must speak to all of this: regency politics and development along difficult mountain roads, markets and ports, religious and customary affairs, and the ever-present question of natural disaster in one of Indonesia's most seismically active provinces.

The 2005 suspension and the Press Law

Radar Sulteng's most famous episode came in June 2005. On 23 June the paper published an opinion article titled Islam, A Failed Religion, written by Rus'an, a lecturer at Muhammadiyah University in Palu, which argued from corruption allegations in the Ministry of Religious Affairs. On the following Saturday some two thousand members of a group calling itself the Palu City Muslim Community protested at the paper, and Alkhairaat clerics also complained; police questioned witnesses from the daily and expert witnesses from the provincial branch of the Indonesian Ulema Council and named the article's author a suspect for insulting Islam. After meeting the protesters, chief editor Kamil Badrun announced that, despite the Press Law, the paper would not publish for three days while it straightened out internal editorial matters, and that those responsible for the opinion and editorial sections would be sanctioned. The episode, reported nationally by The Jakarta Post, remains a documented case study of the pressures on Indonesian local journalism: a provincial daily testing the boundaries of opinion publishing, organised religious protest, police involvement, and a management that chose a self-imposed suspension to defuse the confrontation.

Reporting politics and disaster

Scholars have used Radar Sulteng to study how provincial media handle the two hardest subjects in Central Sulawesi: power and catastrophe. A Universitas Gadjah Mada thesis compared its coverage with Mercusuar's of the disputed replacement of the deputy regent of Parigi Moutong in editions from September 2011 to January 2012, analysing how each paper's discourse and framing served its candidates and readers. Universitas Tadulako researchers separately studied Radar Sulteng's editorial policy in covering the disaster of 28 September 2018, when an earthquake struck the province and triggered a tsunami that hit Palu bay and soil liquefaction that swallowed neighbourhoods in Palu and Sigi, examining how the paper performed the media's disaster functions: as a centre of verified information, a communication lifeline, part of the early warning system and a forum in which the community exchanged information and support. That research treats the paper's own pages from the disaster period as the record, assessing how a local daily that was itself inside the disaster zone organised its news judgement while its city was being rebuilt around it.

Print and digital presence

Radar Sulteng publishes as a printed daily in Palu and maintains a digital presence through radarsulteng.id and the Jawa Pos network's online channels, extending the newsroom's reporting to Central Sulawesi's large population of migrants and students outside the province. Its print format, as documented by local researchers, is a sixteen-page broadsheet-style daily whose front page is built around the editors' chosen headline and whose city rubric, Palu Rumah Kita, anchors coverage in the life of the capital. Within the province's media market it competes with Mercusuar, the Muhammadiyah-rooted daily from which it historically emerged, with Alkhairaat's media and with national portals and television, holding its position as the Jawa Pos group's representative and, in the assessment of local journalism researchers, one of the reference points by which Central Sulawesi readers judge the news of their province.

Rebirth as Radar Palu

In 2025 the company announced the most visible change in the newspaper's identity since its separation from Mercusuar: Radar Sulteng became Radar Palu. The launch, held in Palu before regional government figures, community leaders, local businesspeople and loyal readers, was presented by director Murthalib, who had previously served as the paper's editor-in-chief, as more than a change of name: a commitment to keep innovating and adapting to readers in the digital era while keeping the printed newspaper alive at a time when many conventional media had folded. The company deliberately kept the word Radar, the shared identity of Jawa Pos local newspapers across Indonesia, and chose Palu for its meaning in the culture of the Kaili, the city's indigenous people, in which Palu is understood as land that has been lifted up, a symbol of rising again and of new hope. For a city whose recent history is defined by the 2018 earthquake, tsunami and liquefaction and the long recovery that followed, the symbolism was explicit: the newspaper renamed itself for its city's resilience as well as its address.

Radar Sulteng in the province's history

Across its life as Radar Sulteng, the newspaper traced the arc of post-reformasi Central Sulawesi: born from a licence-era partnership between a national group and the province's oldest paper, independent from 2002 and a daily in its own right from 2003, tested publicly in the religious controversy of 2005, studied by researchers for its election and disaster coverage, and present through the catastrophe of 2018 and the reconstruction that followed. Its story also illustrates the wider history of the Indonesian provincial press: how the Jawa Pos network carried metropolitan newspaper methods into provincial capitals, how local papers negotiate between national owners and intensely local loyalties, and how print titles now remake themselves as digital-era local brands. Under its new name of Radar Palu, the newspaper that was Radar Sulteng continues that role as the Jawa Pos daily of Palu and Central Sulawesi, the province's long-established barometer of daily news.