An office we call our own

Sat, 03/22/2008 1:41 PM  |  Opinion

There was confusion among staffers of The Jakarta Post yesterday (Friday) when they turned up for work, and finding their desks became something of an adventure. The cause of this confusion? Most employees from the editorial, business and supporting departments moved into our new office Friday.

Taking advantage of the two-day public holiday, during which we did not publish, workers from a removal agency and our own IT department toiled around the clock to make sure desks, chairs, books and, most importantly, computers and the network system were installed and in order to get today's edition out on time.

Our new office building, at Jl. Palmerah Barat 142-143, is not quite finished yet. Which is why some of us will continue to work from our old office, located nearby. But we hope everyone will be working from the new office building when we officially open it on April 25, which is timed to coincide with our 25th anniversary.

The difference between this new five-story office building and the one we left behind at Jl. Palmerah Selatan 15 is significant: Now we have an office we can proudly call our own.

Twenty-five years is a long time for any company to acquire its own office building. But we never felt the need to have our own building when we were a single product company. Now, with the recent expansion into magazines (the Weekender and YouthSpeak) and the development of our online/Internet portal, we felt we needed to move to a bigger and more integrated premise.

The move also means we all work from the same building. In order to protect editorial credibility, however, we will continue to maintain the wall separating editorial and business interests.

We have come a long way.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1983, The Jakarta Post started in a renovated shack rented from Kompas/Gramedia business group. Those were the days of typewriters and where every other journalist was a chain-smoker.

In August 1990, we moved to another temporary shack adjacent to the Kompas/Gramedia building while the proprietor of the land, the Kompas Pension Fund, tore down the shack that had housed our operation for seven years and rebuilt a two-story building.

In April 1992, we moved to this more modern building courtesy of the Kompas Pension Fund. Pretty soon, computers replaced the noisy typewriters and non-smokers outnumbered smokers, and after a vote, the newsroom became a non-smoking area.

Sixteen years later, we felt we had to move on. We needed a bigger space to run our operation. And move we did this week.

Obviously, we could not have enjoyed the growth we have these past few years, and moved into this new larger office building this week, without the support of all our stakeholders: the readers, the advertisers, the supporting advertising and distribution/circulation agencies, as well as the dedication and the hard work of all our staffers, past and present, and the patience of our shareholders who continue to believe in what we do.

We realize a new office building is simply a facility for the staffers, who are ultimately the most important resource in any newspaper operation. But we are resolute that a new building for us means a reinvigorated spirit to do better in serving the needs and interests of our readers and advertisers.

We dedicate this new office building to all our readers and advertisers, and to all the other stakeholders.

Thank you.

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