Tsunami province Aceh daily newspaper back again
Title -- 4600 INDONESIA: Tsunami province daily back again
Date -- 3 January 2005
Byline -- None
Origin -- Pacific Media Watch
Source -- Jakarta Post, via fbp@igc.org 2/1/05
Copyright - JP
Status -- Unabridged
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SERAMBI BACK ON NEWSSTANDS AGAIN
JAKARTA (JP Online/Pacific Media Watch): After six days of absence due to the destruction of its office and disappearance of most of its employees, Aceh's only daily Serambi Indonesia hit the streets again on Sunday.
This time Serambi greets its readers not from its usual base in Banda Aceh, the capital of Indonesia's Aceh province, badly damaged from Sunday's tsunami, but from a new base in Lhokseumawe, North Aceh.
Serambi's office and printing house in downtown Banda Aceh were leveled to the ground, with nothing left intact, and many of its journalists are still missing, feared dead.
The daily, this time, is only eight pages, half its normal size of 16 pages, due
to shortages of manpower.
According to Serambi's Lhokseumawe branch head Ismail M. Syam, the eight-page
newspaper is currently being run by 10 people, comprising six journalists and
four production staff.
The 10 people are not all Serambi's employees from Lhokseumawe but rather
employees from Kompas's Persda network, sent from other parts of the country,
including from Makassar, Batam and Jakarta. Serambi is owned by the Kompas
Gramedia Group.
"Now, the status of editors and reporters is the same. Everyone has to get
into the field and file stories. Otherwise, we will not be able to fill the
paper with local news," Ismail told The Jakarta Post.
He explained that 60 percent of Serambi's 225 employees -- including
journalists -- are still unaccounted for.
Serambi is not alone, though. Since Sunday, media companies outside Aceh were
also frantically trying to locate their reporters and staff based in the
province.
Serambi was established in the early 1990s by several senior Kompas
journalists, including its editor-in-chief Syamsul Kahar, who survived the
tragedy.
Following the disaster, a number of Serambi people, backed by its parent
publication, prepared printing of the paper from a new base, Lhokseumawe.
Lhokseumawe was chosen because the newspaper has a five-unit printing house
in the city.
The publisher, PT Aceh Media Grafika, said it is printing 10,000 copies per
day -- compared to 100,000 before the disaster. All copies are being
distributed free of charge, and it will remain free for the next week or so.
* Check for the latest information in the region at
www.asia-pacific-action.org
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