'Panji Masyarakat' stops publication
Muhammad Nafik, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The Panji Masyarakat monthly magazine halted publication two months ago due to severe financial problems heightened by the country's prolonged economic crisis.
The magazine officially ceased operations in early November last year because of cash flow difficulties, said one of its senior journalists, who declined to be named.
"Every payday, the management became confused on how to pay its employees' salaries," he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
He admitted that the magazine had never made a profit nor was the company able to cover its monthly operational costs.
"Seen from a business point of view the company was not profitable, but we tried very hard to keep afloat right up until its closure."
The journalist further said it was impossible to republish the magazine as most of the company's assets had been sold to employees or outsiders.
Before the closure, the magazine's chief editor, Uni Zulfiani Lubis, who also served as the company's director, resigned in July last year as she felt "no longer comfortable" with the company. She has since joined private TV 7 station, serving as a talk show presenter.
Panji Masyarakat, founded by the late well-known Muslim scholar, Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah (Hamka), first appeared in 1959, but it first stopped publication in March 1996. Since then Hamka's family ceased control of the magazine's management.
In April 1997, the magazine reappeared after a one-year break under the new management of PT Panji Media Nusantara. Three years later a senior leader of the Golkar Party and businessman Fahmi Idris was appointed by a controversial shareholders' meeting in 2000 as the company's president.
Fahmi, a son-in-law of the late former chairman of the Indonesian Ulemas Council (MUI), Hasan Basri, who was one of Panji's shareholders, took the post several months after having served as a manpower minister under the government of B.J. Habibie, ex-dictator Soeharto's hand-picked successor.
The magazine sold some 10,000 copies every month. But its circulation number had soared to 30,000 copies in February 1999, when it published a controversial report on bugged phone conversations between Habibie and the then attorney general, Andi Muhammad Ghalib. Based on the conversations, Habibie ordered Ghalib not to be serious in the investigation of Soeharto's alleged graft cases.
Since 1997, the magazine no longer focused its coverage on Islamic oriented news.
Panji Masyarakat's shareholders are scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss several problems related to the closure, including demands for severance payment by employees.