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n celebrating 30 years of existence in 2013, The Jakarta Post can justly claim to be a national institution in its own right. Our journalists and staff can take pride in how over the course of its history, the paper has joined in the nation'€™s struggle for democracy and established itself as an important part of Indonesia'€™s emerging democratic institutions.

Ever since the paper'€™s first edition hit the streets on April 25, 1983, the Post has consistently fought for a more democratic Indonesia. Flipping through old and new editions alike, a reader can find a common thread in our stories and editorials: a push to support freedom and democracy.

We have our own selfish reasons for doing this. To best practice our art and craft to serve the public
interest, journalists need the space and freedom that only a democratic society can provide. We will not hesitate to break our commitment to impartial reporting when it comes to the defense or promotion of freedom, particularly the freedom of speech and its essential adjunct, the freedom of the press.

The Post and its journalists have been part of the national struggle for the freedom of the press since the paper'€™s inception. This was the good fight, started by the founding editors and continued by their successors to this day. It is the duty of any decent newspaper to safeguard and promote freedom and democracy.

As an English-language newspaper serving a non-English speaking community, the Post may be small in its reach and audience. However, the size of our Indonesian readership has been growing, and, since the mid-1990s, has surpassed our number of non-Indonesian readers, the original target audience when we started publishing in 1983. The mix of Indonesians and non-Indonesians among the paper'€™s readers continues to be reflected in our print edition. And, with the advent of the Internet, our global reach has widened.

While both groups of readers are equally important, the large size of the Indonesian readership is testament to the acceptance of the newspaper at home. In Asia, we can claim to be as good as the best English-language newspapers in the region. At home, we can claim to be as good as the best Indonesian-language newspapers.

There is no secret as to how we pulled it off. We simply paid greater attention to the quality of English used in the newspaper and invested large sums to build a strong team of copy editors and develop our editorial staff.

We also built our credibility as a newspaper by coming up with our own stories; exclusives; memorable headlines, from time to time; and even a scoop or two.

May 1998 was a milestone for Indonesia as well as for the Post. The paper came of age amid one of the most crucial moments in the nation'€™s history, preserved in print in several key stories:

'€¢ On May 22, the paper published a memorable banner headline, in huge bold letters, reading '€œI QUIT'€. We quoted a statement that then president Soeharto made a day earlier, when he vacated power after facing relentless pressure from a series of student-led people power demonstrations. The headline emerged after lengthy discussions between the editors. We went over Soeharto'€™s speech again and again until we were convinced that he did not resign or step down. The president simply quit. We couldn'€™t have come up with a more dramatic and punchy headline.

'€¢ More significant was the edition of May 21, when we pulled off what must count as one of the biggest scoops in Indonesian media history. The Post was the only newspaper that carried a story that said that Soeharto would announce his resignation that morning from the Presidential Palace. Our editors relentlessly worked the phones the previous night. We even held the presses for almost two hours, at the risk of missing the delivery vans. It was worth it. We checked and rechecked rumors about the old man'€™s plan to step down and waited until we had confirmation from four sources before going to print. It was a scoop that everyone who was directly or indirectly involved with can be very proud of.

'€¢ On May 12, the Post established its credibility as the only newspaper that got the story right about the shooting of Trisakti University students by unknown gunmen. While all other national and international media outlets were reporting six deaths, we reported only four. I remember the following day getting bullied by angry students and readers '€” not to mention by my fellow journalists in the newsroom '€” accusing us of belittling the sacrifice of the students by reporting fewer deaths. However, as it turned out, there were only four slain students when the university'€™s rector the next day bid goodbye to the four heroes of '€œreformasi'€ from the campus. Those involved in writing the news knew that we were right all along. One of our young reporters managed to get into the hospital where the bodies of the students had been taken. We had an exclusive '€” and we stuck to our belief that we got it right, even when everybody else was reporting otherwise.

Running a newspaper is about building credibility and gaining the trust of readers. Even with the support of the four major media groups in the country that formed the newspaper '€” Suara Karya, Kompas, Tempo and Sinar Harapan '€” the founding editors, mostly recruited from the parent companies, knew from the beginning that they would eventually have to develop stories and a style of reporting that would be vastly different from Indonesian-language newspapers.

For a new newspaper in the early 1980s '€” when the press was tightly controlled by the government '€” building credibility was already a tall order, especially building creditability with non-Indonesian readers, who were critical and would not accept republished government propaganda.

Like a few of our Indonesian-language peers, we took our chances and pushed the lines of freedom as far as we could '€” while most others timidly played it safe. While in those days there was no official censorship, offending the government meant risking your publishing license, which meant the death of a publication. Editors had to guess where the invisible line was that would be acceptable to the government. Some of our peers, such as Tempo magazine in 1994, paid the ultimate price.

Little did we realize that by pushing the line with journalism as critical as the condition allowed, we earned plaudits not only from readers '€” who learned the fine art of reading between the lines and of turning to Page 2 for the real news '€” but also from government officials. Then foreign minister Ali Alatas, for example, often touted The Jakarta Post to visiting foreign ministers as an example of press freedom in Indonesia. We were happy to play along, always making sure that we had a strong editorial critical of the government on the day Pak Ali entertained foreign dignitaries.

As an English-language publication, we enjoyed a tad more freedom than Indonesian publications '€” not a whole lot, but enough to make us stand out from the pack. The government assumed that our readership was limited and that our reports could do little harm. We took advantage of this to the fullest, which helped to build our reputation and credibility as an independent newspaper. It was good while it lasted.

When the military raided the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) in July 1996, storming the place where anti-government activists and supporters of Megawati Soekarnoputri had holed up for months, we gave no-holds-barred reports of the violence. A couple of weeks later, our editors were summoned by then information minister Harmoko, who showed us a faxed copy of the story and asked: '€œWhy was this distributed in a mosque in some small village in East Java?'€

We had little idea of how far our reach had gone. In those days, e-mail and the Internet were still a novelty. Facsimiles were the preferred means to distribute subversive pamphlets. The stories were faxed and copied across the nation. After that episode, the government got wind of the extent of our readership. We lost some of that freedom and our editors started to get more frequent calls and summonses from the Information Ministry or the
Indonesian Military.

If, in its first 15 years, The Jakarta Post built its reputation by working around government censorship, in the paper'€™s second 15 years since 1998, we have tried to build our credibility in a much freer press environment. The press licensing system was lifted as soon as Soeharto stepped down, and the Indonesian press has not looked back since. However, this has also meant that we lost one of our competitive advantages over Indonesian-language media. Everyone now enjoys the same freedom.

In a more democratic '€” and more competitive '€” environment, The Jakarta Post has risen above the fray by maintaining a critical voice and speaking out on issues that others neglect, forget or play down. Democracy, freedom, the abuse of power, corruption, accountability, discrimination and the persecution of minorities '€” and a whole lot of other issues '€” remain our focus.

We take pride in becoming a national institution that has produced many outstanding journalists, as well as preparing, through our recruitment system and in-house training programs, a host of young college graduates recruited as reporters for other equally rewarding professions. Many of our alumni have gone on to work in diplomacy or at the United Nations, or for international agencies and business es whose work includes public relations, academia, politics and civil society organizations. A few have even gone on to work for international media.

Meanwhile, our opinion pages have become a virtual public square to engage in a healthy discourse on current affairs. More and more Indonesians are expressing their views freely, thanks to democracy, and more them are expressing those views in English. We'€™re only too happy to accommodate and provide column inches for these diverse views.

Thirty years after The Jakarta Post'€™s launch, a new generation of editors and reporters are running the newsroom. They have the unenviable task of grappling with the fierce competition unleashed by the more open and free media environment '€” and with the Internet revolution that has dramatically changed the way people access news. We must also change with the times, and we are in the process of becoming a more digital news organization.

However, our commitment to promoting and strengthening democracy, freedom and basic human rights will continue. The newspaper has grown, prospered and been able to contribute to the nation-building process in no small measure because of our commitment to democracy and to upholding the values and principles of good journalism.

This article was written by Senior Editor Endy M. Bayuni.