See You at the 2023 Local Media Summit!

TheIndonesia.id - Indonesian biggest event for local media, the 2022 Local Media Summit, organized by Suara.com in collaboration with International Media Support (IMS) at the Jakarta National Library on 27-28 October 2022 has just ended. This event was attended by 300 local media from the western tip of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam to the land of Papua.

This event discussed how local media can become smarter and savvier in content and business. There is a thing in common that all the participants who attended this event have namely that the media must embrace each other in order to grow and develop. The exchange of information and sharing of conditions happened not only in the workshop room but also in break sessions.

CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Suara.com, Suwarjono, said that in today's digital world, local media are also required to think about infrastructure so that the content produced can reach massive audiences. At the local level, the media does not only focus on content creation, because the content is only a small part of the media business in today's digital era.

"For friends now who are media owners, what we have to learn is not only content. Content is only a small part (of the business)," said Suwarjono when opening the 2022 Local Media Summit.

First Day of Local Media Summit 2022

On the first day, a number of interesting workshops took place. It started with a conference about the future of local media and how the business model and audience development. Lars Bestle, who is the head of IMS in Asia, triggered the forum then followed by Saptini Darmaningrum as the business director of BeritaJatim; Janoe Arijanto, the chairman of the Indonesian Advertising Companies Association; and Gunawan Susanto, the Country Manager of AWS Indonesia.

Lars Bestle explained that one of the biggest problems for journalism is the financial crisis. All stakeholders should find a solution to this problem. The most important thing, said Lars Bestle, is how the journalism quality remains respected and protected.

Maintaining the quality to maintain dignity of journalism was also one of the discussions at the workshop on startup media at the 2022 Local Media Summit. In this workshop, Devi Asmarani as Co-Founder of Magdalene and Hendri Salim as the Head of TechInAsia Indonesia spoke about maintaining trust.

In their presentation, the two journalists said that being different was very important for local media. The difference with the big media is one of the attractions that entice investors. Another interesting point is how local media can build and maintain a community which is what Devi at Magdalene did.

"The community is the most important part. At first, it was difficult, Magdalene appeared at the beginning with a different appearance. We started consulting with the community. We embraced the women and feminist communities. We opened a community rubric. We could provide promos for their events," Devi explained.

Still, on the first day of the 2022 Local Media Summit, there were two other workshops, namely about finding a business model for local media and podcast business for local media. Carl Javier, the CEO of Puma Podcat from the Philippines, explained that podcasts are an alternative for media to earn income. The key, says Carl Javier, to building and developing a podcast, is consistency.

Javier said there are three tough challenges in the podcast business, the market, finance, and association issues. "This is our experience in 2008 when we started to form. It was very difficult for us, there was no market, of course, our readiness to boost the market in the field. It's sad that people don't want to pay journalists because of the public space," he said.

Meanwhile, Aliefah Permata Fikri, MGID Indonesia's senior Account Manager, stated that collaboration is important for the media to find and develop the right business model. "As a native advertising platform, we want to provide support to local media because media is a partner (MGID)," she said.

The first-day session was closed with a networking night which was hosted by Inayah Wahid, the youngest daughter of President Abdurrahman Wahid. Inayah Wahid is also the founder of HAMburger Podcast, a podcast startup.

Second Day Local Media Summit 2022

On the second day, the first session discussed how to collaborate with Suara.com. Also presented in the session Yoursay.id Community Development Manager, Randy Sadikin. Yoursay is a user-generated content platform under Suara.com.

Sadikin said that the most important thing for collaboration is breaking up barriers between readers and writers. Suara.com built Yoursay.id to create opportunities to collaborate with journalists and writers at the local level.

"Yoursay has 80,000 members and has produced around 4,500 pieces of content. (The user's demography is) 37 percent male, 63 percent female, aged 17-30 years. They come from Yogyakarta (35 percent), Central Java (20 percent), and the rest are from Jakarta and several other areas," explained Rendy.

In the sixth workshop with the theme of hyperlocal strategy for local media, Muhammad Zuhri, founder and Chief Editor of Batamnews explained the most crucial thing in developing a local media is to have a vision and mission. From this vision and mission, media leaders can set targets for what they want to achieve.

“This vision and mission is everything. Must be poured to employees who are in the local media. Being delivered in the editorial office, marketing room, until the lowest level work such as cleaning service in the office," Zuhri explained.

With that modality and trust development, said Zuhri, a local media is able to get investors. It is important not to be tricky with investors.

“In Batam, not everyone who has money is interested in the media. The first thing we have to do is create branding for our media. The product must be good, meaning that the content produced must be of high quality,” explained Zuhri.

On the last day of the Local Media Summit 2022, there was also a workshop that discussed transforming legacy media into digital media. The closing session of the 2022 Local Media Summit was filled with a Conference titled “Reinventing Local Media: Finding Opportunities and Overcoming the Challenges".

Member of the Press Council, Sapto Anggoro, emphasized that the media also has an important role in social control. “Don't sell your ideals. Because we have become the fourth pillar of democracy. Strong press and financially independent, they should carry out the mandate of the Press Law," he explained.

The closing of 2022 Local Media Summit ended with a group photo session and a big homework for the participants who attended to become good at building and developing their local media.

See you at the next Local Media Summit!