From Unspun
http://unspun.wordpress.com/2006/08/31/the-point-about-to-make-a-point/ The Point about to make a pointPosted by unspun on August 31st, 2006
New English daily The Point will differentiate itself from
The Jakarta Post by focusing on business and finance rather than politics, its managing editor Riris Irawati said when Unspun visited their office in Jalan Mendawai 1 today.
It looks like they will be well-positioned to do so since their President Director is Bakti Luddin, a director of PT Menamas who is also the head of Kadin’s Electric Energy Committee and a Governing Council for ITB’s School of Business Management. He’s also been quoted by newspapers as an “energy expert” from the Indonesian Electrical Power Society.
The paper, said Riris, is now set to hit the streets by the second week of September and it will have its official launch and Press Conference before Ramadhan. The initial print run will be about 20,000. They may lower it during Ramadhan and raise it after the new year. It will also print Monday to Saturday as readership is usually very low on Sundays.
The Point, which has the slogan: News and Beyond, will initially be 20 pages and a third of it would be taken up with business news. The business desk, said Riris, will be headed by Vidya Dahlan. Other editors are Ibrahim Zakir (editor-in-chief), Robert Sulistyo (Sports) and Oei Eng Goan (Oped). There are currently about 40-50 editorial staff and The Point may add on to this team after they launch.
Unspun had a look at the Jalan Mendawai office and found it was all new, having been recently renovated. It has two floors, the bottom for the bosses and the business division, the top for the editorial.
There were also dry run mockups of the pages and the layout of the newspaper was modular. It also looked fairly clean, with headlines being a mix of two sets of fonts, a sans serif and a serif font. The mock ups still suffered from some tombstone effects but by and large it looks good.
Asked why another English-language daily, Riris said country as large as Indonesia needs to be represented by more than just one daily. She also said that The Point will leave the Post to focus on politics.”That is their forte”. The Point, said said would instead focus on business and finance.
Asked if rumors were true that Bakrie was involved in the paper, she said no although some individual investors may belong to Energi. But she would not say more, only that all would be revealed when they launch and hold their press conference.
Here’s to competition among the English-language newspapers.