Indonesian media, property, infrastructure and banking tycoon James Riady is to shortly launch a new daily newspaper in Indonesia, the Jakarta Globe. The new newspape for Indonesia  was reported on back in August, but it has emerged that it will hit the market soon.

News Corporation executive Lachlan Murdoch - son of Rupert Murdoch - is also reportedly taking an interest and looking at other media investments in Indonesia with Riady.

The 48-page, full-colour English-language broadsheet newspaper will initially just be distributed in large Indonesian cities and Singapore, with a print run of "over 50,000", according to launch editor David Plott. Plott is a former editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review.

Plott says, "Indonesia's a little like India, in the sense that it's a market where print publications are still quite profitable and there's still quite a lot of growth potential; in terms of advertising it's a $US3 billion a year market."

The competition for the new player in the market will be the Jakarta Post, an English-language daily with circulation of 18,000 copies. It will also have an online version; however, issues surround the name jakartaglobe.com, as a local news aggregator already operates under the name.

There have been significant challenges for the newspaper with retraining staff, as "Newspapers aren't what they used to be. You can't survive by just reporting what happened, particularly in Indonesia, where things aren't always what they appear to be, and what's actually going on behind events is not clear to anyone except insiders."

Source: The Australian via IFRA Executive News Service