Progress under distress

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.