Mon, 26 Apr 1999

Progress under distress

For the second year in a row this year, The Jakarta Post is celebrating its anniversary, April 25, modestly, without fanfare. For one thing there is the question of sensitivity and empathy for the lot of the millions of fellow countrymen and women whose lives have been severely affected by the current situation. But of no less importance, the endless political and economic crisis is still biting deep into this newspaper's fortunes, as it is for almost everyone else in this country.

There is, however, an appreciable difference between this year and the last for which we are indebted to our readers, contributors and advertisers, since it is for a good part due to their understanding and support that the Post has been able not only to weather the storm, but to turn the corner.

Not that the crisis is over. Far from it. The possibility that things will once again take a turn for the worse, financially at least, is still ever present unless the emergency measures introduced last year, when the crisis was at its deepest, are kept in place. For our staff and management, the time still has not come when they can cease making the sacrifices they have voluntarily been making for a little more than a year.

Even so, the worst seems now to be over and the point seems to have been reached where we can look forward to resuming the kind of service that our readers deserve, and improving the quality of our newspaper with regard to both content and distribution. A beginning toward this end has already been made with the introduction this month of the application of long-distance printing technology to benefit our readers in Bali. We owe special gratitude to two partners in particular in Bali, Gramedia and Bali Post, for making this possible.

Bali, the country's foremost tourist destination and its second most important gateway after Jakarta, has vast potential for newspapers, provided of course that delays in distribution can be reduced to the minimum, or better, eliminated altogether. Long-distance printing effectively removes this hurdle, which a conventional distribution system inevitably brings, and it makes it possible for readers in Bali to read all the important news articles, analyses and feature at the same time they appear in print in Jakarta. In itself a potential market, once the time factor is eliminated Bali could also serve as a base for distribution to surrounding areas, such as West and East Nusa Tenggara and East Java.

A further step toward expanding the reach of this newspaper and improving its service is the introduction of our online service, starting this week. By presenting news and news analyses that are current, compact and up-to-date, we aim to provide our readers with a one-stop reference source on Indonesia. Our ultimate aim is to make our website service a leading information center on Indonesia that is not only current, but also in-depth and comprehensive.

Needless to say, we intend to maintain the same spirit of responsible freedom that we have tried to uphold ever since our first edition appeared on the newsstands exactly 16 years ago. This has not always been easy. Nevertheless, it is our dictum that our readers deserve to be informed of all the important events and circumstances as they are, though with reason and responsibility.

Our hope is that the current atmosphere of press freedom will hold, because, as the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus once said: A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will always be bad. Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.