Maverick Indonesia

Blogging to win!

Annually Mavericks revisit Click of The Week and give the Click of The Year Award to the best. This year, the award went to Irawan Santoso, current journalist for the litigation magazine, Ombudsman.

Last Friday (4/7), Maverick invited Irawan Santoso, who is also the winner of the Anugerah Adiwarta Sampoerna for two consecutive years, to Maverick’s sharing session. The sharing session is a special occasion where all Mavericks come and share their opinions on a determined topic. The topic ranges from PR-related issues to any subject Mavericks deem interesting or necessary to discuss. Usually held on Fridays, the session also involves lots of assorted snacks or meals such as chicken satay, or fried drunken noodle, if you are lucky!

Irawan Santoso was a former journalist for Forum before joining Ombudsman. In addition to his regular writing tasks, Irawan indulges his idealism through blogging. “You may find some writing in my blog published in the magazine but some are specifically designated for blog walker,” said Irawan. “This article Themis, for example, has never been published anywhere. I wrote and address this article to anyone interested in law. In Indonesia, struggling middle class lawyers are the potential internet audience who blog walk.”

So what is so exciting about blogging? “For someone who can’t live without writing, blogs definitely quench our thirst of more media to write. You can just write anything you want and speak your mind,” Irawan said.

Congratulations Mas Irawan! Looking forward to reading more inspiring works from your blog.

The e-paper trend

 

 

Kompas launched its e-paper service on 3 July 2008 on the heels of a similar launch by Republika, Kontan and Koran Tempo. What these papers man by an e-paper offering is to literally print the papers virtually on the web.

 

Using something call soft press technology, readers can go to their sites and click onto a page and a particular story. The story clicked pops up large enough to read and is of good resolution.

It is a step toward meeting the challenges posed by a Web 2.0 world but it is difficult to see how merely printing the papers on soft copy instead of hard ones will make the papers more competitive. Marshall McLuhan spoke about the medium being the message but the papers here seem to be trying to send out the same messages with different mediums.

You cannot help but wonder whether anyone online would find this format useful at all.

Written by Marini

Maverick celebrates 6th anniversary

Exactly one week after the Maverick Night Fever Media Gathering 2008, the Mavericks went partying again. This time it was a specially organized event for all Mavericks, from the support staff, media trackers, to associates and Partners, to celebrate Maverick’s 6th anniversary.

Held at Maroush, Crowne Plaza, the evening was full of nice surprises, including live performances from the Mavericks, a special guest from Gavin Anderson, and the distribution of copies of a book on Maverickism. And you know what? Inside each copy were free vouchers for everyone. The highlight of the night was, of course, the Maverick Annual Talent Award. All Mavericks, except the Partners, were divided into 7 groups, each to give a four-minute performance, either live or taped.

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Farewell to Santi

It was such a shock. Last night I received a text message from my journalist friend in Kontan,

Agung. He informed me that Santi from Kompas, passed away last night. I knew that Santi has been battling with cancer since 2004 but I could hardly believe the news.

Tiur Santi Oktavia, Santi’s full name, was a fun person to talk to, she was a perfectionist. As far as I remember, every time she came to a news event, she was always asking questions that betrayed her natural curiosity about the event and things around her. This curiosity also drive her to do what good journalists do - double check her information and find other sources to corroborate the information or add their perspective to her stories that we all at Maverick agreed were always well researched and written.

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kanalOne: The Meganewsportal

Yet another news portal on Indonesia will open on the 24th of this month. The name is kanalOne and it claims itself to be “A to-be-born megaportal designed to produce fast and in-depth news and information in two languages, Bahasa Indonesia and English.

“This online media,” it continues to say, “will creatively combine texts, images, audio, and videos, in covering national and international issues with a high journalistic standard. kanalOne can be accessed via mobile phones or PDAs. We envision this media as a co-effort in building and enlightening our Nation through smart, sharp, balanced, and entertaining journalism.”

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Maverick Goes 70s at “Maverick Night Fever”

Everybody loves to party, journalists no exceptions!

That was obvious from our 2008 media gathering last Thursday. Some 80 journalists from various media companies joined the party at Airman Planet, Sultan Hotel. Dubbed the “Maverick Night Fever”, the event took the theme “disco seventies”. Everybody–our partners and associates–made serious efforts to live up to the theme, donning their wigs, miniskirts, leather boots and flowery shirts, to mention a few of the 70s items on display that night!

It’s always nice to see people enjoy themselves and unwind (at least for a while!) after a tight deadline, stress, or anything that is associated with working as journalists. Visiting with and getting to know fresh faces in a different environment other than work can be a very useful stress relief.

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2008 Maverick “Click of The Year” goes to…

In Maverick, we’re not only serious about blogging; we also have lots of fun with it!

Click of The Week has become our new racing game, where Maverick kids compete to spot journalists blogs over the net and have it being reviewed in our blog. Each year, during Maverick’s Media Gathering, we crowned a journalist as the recipient of our Click of The Year Award.

Judged by the Mavericks (cat-fight involved), this award is given to the most outstanding journalist blog from our 2008 Click of The Week list, and convey these following qualities: (more…)

Tags: aas, anugerah adiwarta sampoerna, Click Of The Week, click of the year, irawan santoso, journalist blog, Maverick, media gathering, rechstaat

An Intern: Encountering Maverick’s CSL session

One week into my stint as an ITB intern at Maverick I received an invitation to sit in at a lecture that is part of the PR firm’s Corporate Social leadership (CSL) program. The program aims to help non-profit organizations conduct their own PR programs by running them through a 10-month course on public relations and communications skills.

The lecture was to be about online PR and presentation skills so I had two expectations. Firstly, I hoped to learn how to use what’s happening on the Net and online to help me communicate more efficiently. Secondly, I could benefit from skills that would enhance my presentations.

I was not disappointed.

On of the useful things I learned from the online PR session was about street creds. (more…)

Tags: Arif Pranoa, Civil Society Organization, CSL, intern, Maverick, NGO, online PR, presentation skills