TheJakartaPost
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Editorial: Time for a change
Readers may wonder why The Jakarta Post has changed its appearance beginning with today*s edition
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Readers may wonder why The Jakarta Post has changed its appearance beginning with today*s edition. The simple answer is, the time has come.
If the old saying is true that everything is in a state of flux, then it is natural that we too must adapt to the constantly changing environment. Some changes are more consequential than others, and this is probably one of those moments for the Post.
The newspaper business has changed dramatically in the past few years, and, most importantly, readers have adjusted their habits, especially in how they get their daily staple diet of news and information.
Our new format is slimmer -- effectively one column less per page -- following the global trend in the newspaper industry. We have adopted a new font type which we selected to make the page more pleasing to the eye. We have added more pages, now in three rather than the former two sections, more than compensating for the compact format.
Inevitably, we have also adapted a new design. We thank our friends at the daily newspaper Kompas for assisting us in developing the new layout. The front page is designed to be easy to read and easy to navigate, the latter all the more important now that the Post comes with more pages and sections. The additional pages allow us to present the stories, photos and graphics in an uncluttered fashion.
The new format and design are the most visible changes readers will notice. We are in fact making a host of other, less obvious changes. We have reorganized, invested heavily in a new system and changed the way we work in the newsroom, all with the objective to make our work more effective and efficient.
We have revamped our paradigm of what constitutes stories fit to publish. This is essential in the face of growing competition from other media that provide news in real time such as the Internet and 24-hour TV news channels. With news happening at a faster pace, unless we change our paradigm, what we get in before the nightly deadline will no longer be news by the time we reach our readers.
These changes are also designed to integrate better with our ever-growing online edition, thejakartapost.com, which we are developing into a news portal to reach a global audience. We are fully aware that the world is moving fast on all things digital, and The Jakarta Post intends to be there as the primary source of information on Indonesia for the global audience.
The ultimate goal of all these changes is to serve our readers and all other stakeholders better. We owe our very existence -- we just celebrated our 25th anniversary last year -- to our community of loyal readers and advertisers.
We also remain true to the age-old paradigm that says that "the job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
We thank you for your support for all this time. Rest assured, everything else may change, but our commitment to our mission as a newspaper and to serve you and your needs remain constant.
