About Radar Tulungagung

Radar Tulungagung

Radar Tulungagung is an Indonesian-language daily newspaper published in Tulungagung, East Java, as Jawa Pos Radar Tulungagung, part of the Jawa Pos Group. It is the Jawa Pos Radar title for Tulungagung Regency and circulates beyond it into the neighbouring regencies of Trenggalek and Blitar. Academic research on the newspaper describes it as the only, and largest, local print medium in Tulungagung and its most trusted local paper, a status that gives it an unusual position in the regency's public life: it is at once a commercial daily, the local paper of record, and the local arm of one of Indonesia's largest newspaper networks. It publishes in print and online, through radartulungagung.jawapos.com in the Jawa Pos digital network and its own site, with video coverage through Radar Tulungagung TV.

The Radar model in Tulungagung

Radar Tulungagung exists because of the publishing model Jawa Pos developed as it expanded from Surabaya. Outside the Surabaya area, the group's main newspaper is distributed with its city Metropolis section replaced by a regional Radar section containing far more local content, while the main news and sports sections are shared with the Surabaya edition. Jawa Pos maintains fifteen such Radar operations in East Java and Bali, each with its own newsroom in its own city, and reference listings for the group describe Radar Tulungagung, based in Tulungagung, as circulating in Tulungagung, Trenggalek and Blitar. The arrangement means readers in the three regencies receive national and provincial journalism produced by the group's Surabaya newsroom together with pages reported and edited in Tulungagung itself, carrying local news, local advertising and local sport. For a regency town more than 150 kilometres southwest of Surabaya, that local desk is the difference between being covered occasionally by visiting reporters and having a daily newspaper of its own.

The Jawa Pos Group

The group behind the paper began with Jawa Pos itself, founded in Surabaya on 1 July 1949 by The Chung Shen, also known as Suseno Tedjo, who had worked in cinema advertising and named his paper Djava-Post. The paper faded over three decades and was close to bankruptcy in 1982, when circulation had fallen to a few thousand copies and ownership passed to PT Grafiti Pers, the publisher of Tempo. Grafiti's Eric Samola appointed Dahlan Iskan, then Tempo's bureau chief in East Java, to lead it. Dahlan Iskan rebuilt Jawa Pos into one of Indonesia's best-selling dailies, with circulation reaching several hundred thousand copies by the 1990s, and the group pioneered computerised production in 1984, full-colour printing in 1986, remote printing in 1988 and online publishing in 1994. Expansion created a chain of regional newspapers, many carrying the words Pos or Radar, eventually numbering well over a hundred publications. Radar Tulungagung is the chain's title for the southwestern corner of East Java, where the province meets the Indian Ocean.

Tulungagung, the regency it reports

Tulungagung Regency covers about 1,145 square kilometres on the south coast of East Java, roughly 154 kilometres southwest of Surabaya, with a population of about 1.14 million in official mid-2025 estimates; its administrative seat is the town of Tulungagung. The regency borders Kediri to the north, Blitar to the east, Trenggalek to the west and the Indian Ocean to the south, which gives it both an inland farming and trading economy and a rugged southern coastline of beaches beneath limestone hills. Tulungagung is nicknamed Kota Marmer, the Marble City, because it is one of Indonesia's largest marble-producing areas, and stone, marble and onyx working is a signature local industry alongside agriculture, fisheries and small manufacturing. The town is a regional service centre for its own regency and for travellers moving between Kediri, Blitar and Trenggalek, the same three-regency space the newspaper circulates in, so its market for news follows the real geography of work, school, trade and family ties in the southwest of the province.

History and heritage in its pages

The regency the paper covers has an unusually deep recorded history for its journalists to draw on. Tulungagung traces its official establishment to 18 November 1205, when the Lawadan inscription recorded an honour granted by Kertajaya, the last king of Daha, to the community of Thani Lawadan for its loyalty; the date has been used as the regency's anniversary since 2003. The older name of the wider area was Ngrowo, used until the twentieth century when the administrative centre moved from Kalangbret to Tulungagung. Within the regency stands the Gayatri Temple at Boyolangu, the mausoleum of Gayatri, Sri Rajapatni, wife of the first Majapahit king and grandmother of Hayam Wuruk, and the area is also known for the Wajak fossils, the Homo Wajakensis remains that give the regional museum its Wajakensis name. Heritage of this depth supplies a local newspaper with a steady stream of cultural coverage, anniversaries and preservation debates, and it shapes the civic identity that Radar Tulungagung both reflects and helps to maintain.

Democracy and the 2018 elections study

The clearest academic account of the newspaper's civic role comes from a Universitas Brawijaya thesis on its role in the simultaneous regional head elections of 2018 in Tulungagung Regency. The study starts from the paper's position as the regency's only and largest local print medium and examines whether it acted independently under the pressures that election coverage places on local media, when candidates and their supporters may seek favourable treatment. Using interviews, documentation, observation and content analysis, and judging the paper against social responsibility theory of the press, the research found that Radar Tulungagung performed the classic functions of the press: serving the political system, enlightening the public, guarding individual rights, providing entertainment and sustaining itself financially so as to remain free of pressure. It concluded that the paper covered the 2018 Tulungagung election as an independent medium and fulfilled its responsibilities to society. For a directory reader, the study matters because it is independent evidence, produced by a major Indonesian university, of how this particular Radar title behaves in the most sensitive assignment a local newspaper faces.

News coverage and local economy reporting

Day to day, Radar Tulungagung covers regency government and politics, development and infrastructure, education, health, crime and courts, agriculture, fisheries, small business, culture and sport across Tulungagung and its circulation neighbours. Its business reporting engages the structure of the local economy: its coverage has examined, for example, why well over a hundred thousand micro-enterprises in Tulungagung struggle to grow into larger businesses, the kind of ground-level economic journalism that connects regency policy to the warung, workshops and marble yards where most residents work. The paper also reports the Trenggalek coast and Blitar, a city and regency with their own administrations and, in Blitar's case, the national resonance of being the burial place of Indonesia's first president, Sukarno. Covering three jurisdictions from one newsroom requires correspondents and stringers across the territory, and it gives the paper a regional rather than purely regency frame, matching how its readers actually live across these connected southwestern East Java communities.

Print, online and video

Radar Tulungagung publishes its printed daily alongside digital editions at radartulungagung.jawapos.com, inside the Jawa Pos network, and at its own web address, where it presents itself as a local news portal providing current, actual and trusted information about Tulungagung Regency and its surroundings across politics, economy, society, culture, lifestyle and sport. Company directory listings describe the business as a print and online news media company in Tulungagung whose activities extend to advertising, event organising and social media, and give its headquarters address as Jalan Jayeng Kusuma No. 44 in Tulungagung town. Its video arm, Radar Tulungagung TV, publishes local coverage and community programming through online video channels, and the paper maintains active social media accounts for Tulungagung news. This multi-channel pattern, newspaper plus portal plus video plus social, is the standard form of the Jawa Pos Radar titles in the digital period, and it lets a story gathered once by the Tulungagung newsroom serve print subscribers, web readers and video audiences in the same day.

Advertising, events and community presence

As with other local dailies in the group, Radar Tulungagung's business rests on copy sales and on advertising sold to the local market it mirrors: regency businesses, schools and universities, public announcements, property and vehicles. Its listed activities as an event organiser reflect another standard strand of Indonesian local newspaper economics, in which the paper stages or partners community events, competitions and promotions that bind readers and advertisers to the title between editions. For local institutions, the paper's dominance of the regency's print market makes it the unavoidable channel for reaching Tulungagung households in print, and for residents it functions as a bulletin board as well as a news source, carrying the announcements, advertisements and community notices of the regency alongside its journalism. The combination of newsroom, advertising department and events activity under one roof on Jalan Jayeng Kusuma makes the newspaper one of the regency town's visible civic institutions.

Radar Tulungagung today

Today Radar Tulungagung continues to publish in print and online as the local daily of Tulungagung and a regional paper for Trenggalek and Blitar, from its base in Tulungagung town. It works in a national media environment transformed since the Radar network was built: readers now meet local news first on phones and social media, and national portals compete for the same attention. Its durable advantages are those the research record documents: sole occupancy of the local print field in its regency, a trust position examined and affirmed in election-coverage research, the production and distribution scale of the Jawa Pos Group, and a newsroom physically present in the community it reports. For readers in the marble city and the regencies around it, Radar Tulungagung remains the established daily account of their own public life, written where they live.