Press freedom in the digital era

I sub-edited Journ­al­ism in Troubled Times for the IFJ a few years ago. It’s a sad fact that journ­al­ism is not a safe career choice in many coun­tries and that people who cover war zones and other areas also put them­selves at risk (I believe that this week another two journ­al­ists in Afgh­anistan were injured).

This ses­sion we have Bam­bang Harymurti, Chief Editor of Tempo Inter­act­ive, Indone­sia and K Kab­ilan, Editor of Malay­siakini, who have both appar­ently been jailed in the past for con­tro­ver­sial art­icles on their sites. Malay­siakini star­ted online because they could­n’t get a news­pa­per licence. They’ve applied for one again now that they’re so pop­u­lar but it’s been refused. The Prime Min­is­ter told the par­lia­ment last year that he saw Malay­siakini as a threat to national secur­ity. Kab­ilan isn’t sure why…

Harymurti is talk­ing about an inter­est­ing busi­ness model where people SMS a spe­cial number for a pass­word that lasts for a week, mean­ing that they pay for the pass­word and there’s ongo­ing rev­enue. Inter­est­ing, indeed.

Scar­ily, there’s a new Inter­net law in Indone­sia: if you’re found guilty of libel online, it’s a six year jail term! That’s not just for journ­al­ists either, although of course it affects them greatly.

There’s also a cor­rup­tion issue in Indone­sian media, where edit­ors and journ­al­ists don’t run stor­ies because they’re paid off. Tempo Inter­act­ive has a policy that anyone who takes a bribe will be fired.

In the most recent elec­tion, Malay­siakini had volun­teers in all the areas feed­ing back the inform­a­tion to the site. They had when two of the states fell and kept updat­ing. At first people thought they were trying to topple the gov­ern­ment by put­ting out false inform­a­tion but once they real­ised it was real inform­a­tion, the hits star­ted rising. It almost crashed the site. They set up 16 mir­rors that night. Appar­ently one of the first thing that the Prime Min­is­ter said after the elec­tion was “How the hell did Malay­siakini get the res­ults before us?” Since the elec­tion, their sub­scribers have doubled. Now they’re taken ser­i­ously as an inde­pend­ent media outlet.

Tempo only has two journ­al­ists and an editor. A lot of Indone­sian journ­al­ists write one story for their offi­cial outlet but know that they can’t tell the whole truth so they submit a second story to Tempo under an assumed name. One of the journ­al­ists at Tempo was arres­ted but he was jailed with a whole bunch of act­iv­ists so he inter­viewed them all and kept feed­ing exclus­ives to Tempo. Once the gov­ern­ment worked that out, it moved him to a jail out­side Indonesia.

I asked them both why they blog on blog­spot and not offi­cially on their sites (because I’d just Googled them for the links above). Kab­ilan made inter­est­ing points about want­ing to say dif­fer­ent things from his writ­ing in Malay­siakini and that he had hoped they could be seen sep­ar­ately. Harymurti said that the edit­or­ial writ­ing at Tempo is a col­lect­ive voice and that he didn’t want his journ­al­ists to feel they could­n’t con­tra­dict him because ‘the big boss’ had a par­tic­u­lar opin­ion so he tries to keep those sorts of blog posts more private.