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With ICFJ’s help, Aceh’s battered newspapers are getting down to business.
Chris Braithwaite, publisher of the Barton, Vermont, Chronicle, conducted workshops in May and June, 2005 for the business staffs of newspapers in the tsunami-stricken Aceh Province, Indonesia. |
| Photo by: Bustamam |
A second wave of trainers will leave for Aceh in August, 2005 to work with news staffs of both print and television media through September. A third wave is planned for November and December.
The media assistance program is sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which made $1 million in grants to three organizations to help the media in Aceh recover from the Dec. 26, 2004 earthquake and tsunami. The tsunami killed more than 125,000 people in the province and damaged or destroyed half of Banda Aceh, its leading city.
 The wave killed more than one-quarter of the staff of Serambi Indonesia, which was then the only daily in the province, and an even larger share of its business personnel. The wall of water also destroyed Serambi’s Banda Aceh printing press.
Amazingly, Serambi resumed publication in early January, using a satellite press in Lhokseumawe, a city about 250 kilometers down Aceh’s east coast. It has rebuilt its circulation to about 25,000, compared to some 34,000 before the disaster.
At the request of Serambi, a member of Indonesia’s Kompas Gramedia Group newspaper chain, ICFJ’s first step was to send Braithwaite to train staff members on advertising, circulation and promotion techniques.
Braithwaite met the business staff of Serambi three days after his arrival and was running workshops a week later. In a series of meetings, he showed how to approach local businesses, tsunami relief agencies, national advertisers and international businesses to sell more ads. He recommended the use of special sections to boost advertising and zoned editions to localize news. And he reviewed how newspapers adjust their price and the share of space devoted to news and advertising to improve sales or rate of return.
Serambi’s staff was “very engaged,” Braithwaite said. One session at nearby Sabang, went until 10:30 p.m., with conversations continuing in one cabin until 3:30 a.m.
Braithwaite held similar training sessions for business staffers of Serambi’s new competitor, Rakyat Aceh, a Jawa Pos chain paper flown in from Medan, and for smaller weekly publications in the province.
Hazards remain high. Occasional earthquake aftershocks continue to trigger panic in Banda. Braithwaite shrugged off warnings of that Islamic terrorist might target relief workers and deaths in rural Aceh blamed on fighting between GAM, an Acehnese separatist movement, and the Indonesian army. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta closed during Braithwaite’s fellowship, but he soldiered on.
ICFJ administers a $400,000 grant from the Knight foundation to help both print and televised media recover in Aceh. It is working closely with Internews, which is rebuilding Aceh radio stations. The Committee to Protect Journalists is working on a third, related, Knight grant to defend journalistic independence in Indonesia. |
