Survival of media in today's world

Goenawan Mohamad ,  Jakarta   |  Sat, 11/01/2008 10:37 AM  |  Opinion

To be invited to speak at an evening like this, to celebrate The Jakarta Post's achievement, is an obvious honor -- but it is also a kind of duty.

The JP's journalism is a feat in itself. The book launched tonight is a testimony to this admirable performance. Under Endy Bayuni's editorship, it has become a shared space of freedom. Today, this means both freedom from censorship and from the trap of the market.

When I read its business and political stories, I can discern the way the newsroom carefully maintains an unhampered flow of information, combining it with insight and integrity.

The opinion pages are mostly made from ideas that provoke more thinking -- although, I must admit, the prose is not always exciting.

And there is a regular space for the arts and literature -- normally spurned by any newspaper's marketing department. I am happy to note that the editor does not believe that books and dance reviews are only for an eccentric few and incurable snobs.

All in all, the JP is a message of open-mindedness. It is also a body of sensible, level-headed arguments. It can be critical without losing its capacity to trust and to hope.

Unfortunately, not all things are rosy even for this newspaper.

The free flow of information currently enjoyed by the Indonesian media has created its own challenges. In the past, under the Soeharto dictatorship, TV news was tightly watched. It was the print media that made a better source of information.

Indonesian audiences looked down at their TV news and silently scorned the regime's minister of information.

Today, with all kinds of state censorship removed, the electronic media has a much better degree of respectability. In fact, the imbalance has been drastically reversed. Now 90 percent of the information Indonesians receive is the product of television channels.

Accordingly, the print media has to deal with an uncertain future. On top of this, competition, fair or otherwise, has generated a perpetual anxiety of performance. It is a common prediction that only a few will possibly survive.

Yet, its also possible that the end is not near. The print media can serve as a better means for serious examination of day-to-day life. There will always be a need to resist the onslaught of instant information. From time to time, the public will demand a more accurate, fair, reliable and thoughtful representation of the world we live in.

I believe The Jakarta Post is one of the newspapers capable of meeting such a need. Read by the most educated class of Indonesia, it has proven its journalistic credibility and independence since its beginning. After all, the Post is a joint effort of newspapers like Kompas and Tempo, historically never under the diktat of big money or the big state.

I know there is no guarantee that the Post will be immune to a major political or economic disaster. Like everything else, it is contingent on the existing state of the economy -- currently shaken by what Greenspan calls "a financial tsunami".

But let's hope that the Post will be able to withstand it. Let's make it our duty to encourage the newspaper to give its best shot, despite of the turmoil.

I believe this is what I am doing tonight -- something I will be more than happy to do, time and again.

The writer is an author, poet and senior editor of Tempo weekly news magazine. This is an excerpt of the writer's recent speech before the launch of Reporting Indonesia, a book on The Jakarta Post's 25-year history.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.