The term “global village”, coined by Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan, may have become a hackneyed cliche, but for media companies, the term aptly explains the problems they are facing today.

In the past few years, Indonesia has seen a trend of global media companies such as BBC Indonesia and CNN Indonesia offering their content in Indonesian. Meanwhile, the Manila-based Rappler has set up a franchise in Jakarta and Coconuts Media, which focuses on Asia’s cities, has special pages dedicated to Jakarta and Bali.

The latest foreign media company seeking to expand to Indonesia, the third largest democracy after India and the US, is the US-Canadian based VICE, which is set to launch its Indonesian-English online news portal by the end of October.

The rise of digital technology not only forces conventional media outlets, particularly newspapers, to adjust to the changing habits of readers, but also places them in competition with global media giants seeking to broaden their audience.

“If you are an Indonesian television station, or if you are an Indonesian newspaper, you are not just competing with other media institutions inside your country, but you are competing with Al Jazeera, you are competing with CNN,” Krishna Sen told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the 2016 Jakarta World Forum for Media Development at the Nusantara Multimedia University (UMN) in South Tangerang, Banten, on Tuesday.

“There are no national borders any more,” she added.

Sen, coauthor of the seminal book Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, argued that digitalization had allowed for a huge expansion of media, saying that in a globalized world, “the audience is defined by interest, they are defined by ethnicity, age group, and, to some extent, by gender and sexuality”.

“In that context,” she explained, “the old model of aiming to capture an entire national audience has to change.”

VICE, for instance, is targeting Indonesia’s urban middle-class millennials. “Millennials are now ideally positioned to make a positive impact on the major social, economic and environmental issues facing today’s society,” VICE Media managing director for Indonesia Mo Morris told the Post over the phone.

Indonesian Press Council chairman Yosep Adi Prasetyo, affectionately known as Stanley, said competition with foreign media companies was inevitable, especially since Indonesia had already entered into global partnerships, including the ASEAN Economic Community.

He said Indonesian media companies needed to be ready to face new global challenges such as competition from foreign media outlets expanding into the country. The government should take measures by preparing journalism schools for Indonesian reporters to make them more competitive, he added.

The 2016 Jakarta World Forum, held from Sept. 20 to Sept. 22, is the fourth international conference held by the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD). The forum aims to address the challenges arising from the digitalization of media and the ascent of social media, where basically anyone with a phone and an internet connection can be a reporter.

In Indonesia, social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter have posed a serious threat to the pre-eminence of traditional media companies. On social media, for example, it is easy for people to spread hate speech and misinformation behind the cloak of anonymity and challenge the validity of traditional news reports.

The forum, which is being held in cooperation with the Indonesian Press Council and UMN, also aims to enhance protections for journalists, who still face censorship, political violence and even financial punishment for doing their jobs.

Speaking to reporters, GFMD chairman Leon Willems highlighted the plight of investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, a Free Europe Radio journalist who also worked for Azerbaijan Liberty Radio.

She was arrested in December 2014 and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison in September last year after investigating the wealth of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s family. She was released in May following protests from human rights organizations, but she has not been allowed to travel overseas.

“I think the issue of justice for journalists is extremely important,” Willems said. “If you encourage journalists, you also encourage human rights.” (fac/sha)

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