Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Journalism and media industry today faces a devastating dilemma. The industry has yet to answer the crucial but difficult question as to whether the media company could possibly produce high-quality contents and make money at the same time. The urge to survive the deadly competition of media industry makes more mainstream media companies doing pure business and neglecting a proper news value and ethics. Therefore, nowadays good contents do not always mean a good business. Clickbait, hoaxes, inaccurate news, and other low-quality contents are much more appealing in term of business, hence it is not surprising if those contents are dominating Indonesian media on every platform. In order to revive the journalism system in Indonesia, in 2017, the Alliance of Independent Indonesian Journalist (AJI) encourage the practice of entrepreneurial journalism. The organization introduces an initiative where the journalist should build a start-up or community media as an alternative media to challenge the mainstream media power hence the Indonesian citizen could obtain high-quality contents and diverse information which based on journalism ethics consideration. Unfortunately, the idea is not well-received and as successful as they expected for many reasons such as the journalist insufficient knowledge in business and management and the absence of collaborative approach in doing such journalism practice. Therefore, this qualitative study using media management and economics approach was conducted to comprehensively investigate the practice of entrepreneurial journalism in Indonesia, the challenge as well as its future and potential to remedy the journalism problem in the country.