I sub-edited Journalism in Troubled Times for the IFJ a few years ago. It’s a sad fact that journalism is not a safe career choice in many countries and that people who cover war zones and other areas also put themselves at risk (I believe that this week another two journalists in Afghanistan were injured).
This session we have Bambang Harymurti, Chief Editor of Tempo Interactive, Indonesia and K Kabilan, Editor of Malaysiakini, who have both apparently been jailed in the past for controversial articles on their sites. Malaysiakini started online because they couldn’t get a newspaper licence. They’ve applied for one again now that they’re so popular but it’s been refused. The Prime Minister told the parliament last year that he saw Malaysiakini as a threat to national security. Kabilan isn’t sure why…
Harymurti is talking about an interesting business model where people SMS a special number for a password that lasts for a week, meaning that they pay for the password and there’s ongoing revenue. Interesting, indeed.
Scarily, there’s a new Internet law in Indonesia: if you’re found guilty of libel online, it’s a six year jail term! That’s not just for journalists either, although of course it affects them greatly.
There’s also a corruption issue in Indonesian media, where editors and journalists don’t run stories because they’re paid off. Tempo Interactive has a policy that anyone who takes a bribe will be fired.
In the most recent election, Malaysiakini had volunteers in all the areas feeding back the information to the site. They had when two of the states fell and kept updating. At first people thought they were trying to topple the government by putting out false information but once they realised it was real information, the hits started rising. It almost crashed the site. They set up 16 mirrors that night. Apparently one of the first thing that the Prime Minister said after the election was “How the hell did Malaysiakini get the results before us?” Since the election, their subscribers have doubled. Now they’re taken seriously as an independent media outlet.
Tempo only has two journalists and an editor. A lot of Indonesian journalists write one story for their official outlet but know that they can’t tell the whole truth so they submit a second story to Tempo under an assumed name. One of the journalists at Tempo was arrested but he was jailed with a whole bunch of activists so he interviewed them all and kept feeding exclusives to Tempo. Once the government worked that out, it moved him to a jail outside Indonesia.
I asked them both why they blog on blogspot and not officially on their sites (because I’d just Googled them for the links above). Kabilan made interesting points about wanting to say different things from his writing in Malaysiakini and that he had hoped they could be seen separately. Harymurti said that the editorial writing at Tempo is a collective voice and that he didn’t want his journalists to feel they couldn’t contradict him because ‘the big boss’ had a particular opinion so he tries to keep those sorts of blog posts more private.