Google Indonesia announced in a blog post on Thursday that the Post and Kompas would represent Indonesia in a four-month program that would seek to bolster media companies’ digital infrastructure to attract more subscriptions and reader engagement.

The six other participating media organizations are BloombergQuint and The Hindu from India, the Southeast Asia Globe from Cambodia, Business Insider Japan, Malaysiakini from Malaysia, and Commonwealth Magazine from Taiwan.

The program – developed in collaboration with FTI Consulting and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) – is set to be held in October, starting with “virtual onsite sessions” in which the selected media companies will receive a business review, a subscription diagnostic and a capability assessment.

In addition, the program will include a “publisher bootcamp”, scheduled for later this year, where the selected media companies will share their knowledge about the broader news ecosystem.

Joon-Nie Lau, the director of WAN-IFRA in the Asia-Pacific region, said the first-ever GNI APAC Subscription Lab was “timely” considering that advertising revenue had plunged by as much as 70 percent for news publishers amid record online readership.

“We hope that The Jakarta Post and the seven other selected publishers from five countries will be able to greatly benefit from this opportunity to refine and optimize their subscription plans for their readers and strengthen their business models for the sustainable, quality journalism that their readers expect from them,” Lau said in a statement.

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