International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 37

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
rural villages, but whose social networks have been disrupted due to their high workload in
Jakarta and its surrounds.
For that reason, tabloid newspapers in Indonesia have attained success in Jakarta
because the city is the most popular urban destination of their target readers who come
from rural villages and miss the social or unmediated communication they previously
experienced. Attempts to begin tabloid newspapers in other Indonesian cities have failed.
These tabloid newspapers—even though they tried to apply a similar formula to Pos Kota
and Lampu Hijau, such as relying on locality and distinctive style—were not successful. For
example, Surya and Memorandum failed in Surabaya, East Java, even though this is the
second-largest city in Indonesia, with over 2.7 million inhabitants (Wibisono, 2000, p. 164).
One explanation for this is that people in Surabaya, Yogyakarta and other cities in
Indonesia do not need tabloid journalism because they have not experienced the same level
of social disruption that characterizes the wider Jakarta area. They do not need these
alternatives to traditional communication and media because their daily lives are still full of
social engagement. Besides, cities other than Jakarta are not the focus of urbanization. In
the other cities, there are more choices of media because people are less frequently
trapped in traffic jams or may not need to commute daily, thereby lacking the contextual
circumstances in which a tabloid readership might arise. This circumstance also verifies that
tabloid journalism is a fit-for-context phenomenon, which means that different contexts
may lead to different kinds of tabloid journalism. In this case, tabloid journalism in Indonesia
is a phenomenon that only fits the context of urban life in Jakarta and its surrounds.
This circumstance leads to the conclusion that, in Indonesia, the tabloid newspaper
is an urban phenomenon. However, the concept of urban, here, only refers to Jakarta and
its commuter belts (Bekasi, Tangerang, Bogor and Depok) because these cities have special
characteristics as a consequence of urbanization—spatially and culturally—and are thus
different from other cities in Indonesia.
Like other cities in developing countries, the urban population in Jakarta and its
surrounds is growing significantly due to massive urbanization. Jakarta and its commuter
belts are flooded by people from rural areas in all parts of Indonesia in search of work.
According to Giddens (2006), economic reasons are the background of urbanization: ‘People
are drawn to cities in the developing world either because their traditional systems of rural
production have disintegrated, or because the urban areas offer superior job opportunity’ (p.
919). In addition, Tyner (2003) argues that ‘Jakarta’s population is also impacted by seasonal
and daily commuting. Hundreds of thousands of workers, the majority of whom live in the
Jabodetabek [Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi] region commute daily to Jakarta’
(p. 391).
As a consequence of the amount of time spent commuting, urban workers in Jakarta
are forced to commit the majority of their time to employment since ‘most contacts
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