(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Working for Professional Media without Professional Standard of Journalism
(Study of TV News Contributors in Indonesia)
Abstract
Awang Ruswandi
Department of Communication
Universitas Indonesia
awang.ruswandi@ui.ac.id
The rapid growth of television news in Indonesia has supported to freedom of
the press and democracy. Television is one of a phenomenal medium to reach
audiences who lived either in big cities or villages. To cover many areas in
national wide, the news department hired journalists who are called news
contributors or stringers from all over the country. Yet the growth of the
amount of news contributors was not followed by the increase of journalistic
qualities. Recently, many viewers, academia, and others argue their
complaints about bad TV news. The presentation of news ranges from
sensational content, unethical report, to trivial things. The study is a
qualitative research using in-depth interview method with the news
contributors. It examines how they work a journalistic job for professional
media and how far they know and apply the procedure of journalistic work.
The findings indicated that TV news contributors with the right skills remain
very difficult. Skilled journalists remain quite rare. Many ordinary people who
have video camera could be a news contributor easily. Most of them came
from various backgrounds and had no professional TV training. Generally, the
TV news contributors had three main problems when they conducted their
news production i.e. lack of knowledge, lack of skill, and lack of ethics. One
of the most fundamental problems is they did a journalistic work without a
professional standard of journalism, whereas the TV news contributors did
their jobs for the professional media.
Key words: Indonesia, news contributor, professional journalist, professionalism, TV
journalism
Introduction
Quantitatively the existence of television news in Indonesia is very interesting and
challenging to be observed. In national level there are eleven stations which have news
program. They consist of one national public television and ten private stations which
have main station in Jakarta. They are all stations who own licenses to air nationally
(Gazali, 2003, p.87). Each station produces and broadcasts news program, even there
are two stations claimed as news channel like CNN. All news programs are also
broadcast all over the country and each station aired the program four times a day. The
programs are morning news, afternoon news, evening news and nightly news. Every
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