Ross Tapsell

Old Tricks in a New Era: Self-Censorship in Indonesian Journalism

Abstract Even though Indonesia has entered a new era of democracy and press freedom, self-censorship still exists in the professional practice of many Indonesian newspaper journalists. Indonesia has a long history of censorship, particularly pressure from the government encouraging journalists to self-censor their work. As such, self-censorship has been encouraged and promoted through the institutionalised and internalised values of many Indonesian newspaper publications. Through interviews with journalists who work for new and re-established newspapers in Indonesia, this article will explain how the practice has evolved, and how it persists today. While the main agent of pressure during Indonesias New Order regime was the government, today the owners of newspapers are powerful figures who exert their influence and hinder the autonomy of Indonesian journalists.

The Media Freedom Movement in Malaysia and the Electoral Authoritarian Regime

Abstract This article will provide an outline of the Malaysian media freedom movement from reformasi in 1998 until today. Research for this article includes testimony from those journalists and activists who attempted to implement reform in the media industry, including detailing reported instances of direct editorial intervention. This article explains that the advent of new media technologies has pushed journalism in new directions in Malaysia, but rather than accept these changes as part of a media liberalisation process, the government has retaliated through constraints and controls over the media and its practitioners. Seen through the prism of media liberalisation, this article adds to the body of scholarly work which examines Malaysia’s electoral authoritarian regime.

Platform convergence in Indonesia: Challenges and opportunities for media freedom

This article examines media freedom in Indonesia, an age where the media landscape is being remade by convergence. Media scholars are debating the implications of this trend for media freedom, with some believing it is opening new possibilities for a greater range of voices to be heard and others identifying new threats it poses. The Indonesian case, where media freedom is viewed as threatened, shows how technological convergence has led to commercial convergence. This article explores how convergence is both contributing to and undermining media freedom in Indonesia. It will do so through an in-depth analysis of the current trends in the Indonesian media industry.

Politics and the Press in Indonesia

This article will explain how one of Indonesia’s richest and most powerful man, Aburizal Bakrie, came to purchase the Surabaya Post in 2008 and the consequences of this purchase. For the journalists who work for this daily Indonesian-language newspaper, the change of ownership affected how they could report the mudflow disaster on the outskirts of Surabaya, in which the Bakrie-controlled company, Lapindo-Brantas, was implicated. Through testimony from Surabaya Post journalists, this article sheds light on what can happen to when an owner with a vested interest in shaping the news decides to purchase the paper. The result is a dramatic decline in the autonomy of its journalists to accurately cover issues relating to the owner. The hindrances to journalist’s autonomy exposed in this case study are a concern for greater press freedom in the archipelago.

1. Challenges and opportunities of the digital ‘revolution’ in Indonesia

Digital technology is fast becoming the core of life, work, culture and identity in Indonesia. In a young nation with a median age of 28 and a rapidly growing urban middle class, Indonesians are using digital technologies in ways that have made the world take notice. In 2016 Indonesia had 76 million Facebook users, the fourth highest number in the world. Jakarta has been named the worlds ‘most active city on Twitter’ (Lipman 2012), while other platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp, LINE, Path and Telegram are all being used in unique and dynamic ways. It is now commonplace to walk into a cafe in one of Indonesias cities and see a group of young Indonesians all sitting in silence, eyes fixed on their mobile phones. Even outside the cities, there is voracious demand for admittance into the digital world. In research exploring the ‘improbability’ of a nation with over 13,0000 islands, a coastline of 54,000 kilometres and a population of 250 million with dozens of ethnicities, journalist Elisabeth Pisani (2014: 3) observed villagers climbing trees in order to get 2G phone reception; ‘Millions of Indonesians live on

Digital Media in Indonesia and Malaysia: Convergence and Conglomeration

2 a day and are on Facebook’, she wrote. Indonesias digital economy is an area of great potential, as shown by the rise of Go-Jek and Grab, ride-sharing companies whose success has been propelled by the ubiquitous use of smartphones. In mid-2016 Go-Jek raised

Indonesia's Media Oligarchy and the "Jokowi Phenomenon"

550 million in new capital, giving it a value of

Australian reporting from East Timor 1975-1999: journalists as agents of change

1.3 billion, an incredible result given it had launched its first mobile phone application only a year and a half earlier (Pratama 2016). On the back of Go-Jek and other e-commerce successes, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) stated that Indonesia aimed to have ‘1,000 technopreneurs’ and a digital economy worth

Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence

130 billion by 2020 (Tapsell 2015a; Wisnu 2016). Politically, digital platforms are being used to organise mass rallies, assist with election monitoring and generally provide a space for greater freedom of opinion and expression on a variety of issues, contributing in no small way to the countrys rambunctious democracy. Anyone running for political office must now consider how to engage with the world of online campaigning, in particular by nurturing a presence on social media. As this book explains, digital technologies have had a marked impact on the media industry, governance, commerce, informal sector employment, city planning, disaster relief, health, education, religion, artistic and cultural expression, and much more.

The media and subnational authoritarianism in Papua

Through a comparative study of trends in the media industry in Indonesia and Malaysia, this article analyzes the transformative process of digital media on news production. Through an in-depth discussion of the influential conglomerates in two neighbouring countries, it examines the effects of digital media on journalism, news, and information. By including Southeast Asia in scholarly debates concerning the impact of the digital revolution, it will address the timely need to balance the existing Western-centric bias in this field of academic research. This article examines the process of platform convergence and how this assists the formation of media oligopolies in both countries. It shows that despite the difference in restrictions in media environments in each country, the process of media conglomeration and convergence is highly similar. This has significant impact on the way we assess the impact of digitalization on media pluralism and diversity in the convergence era.