For Indonesia’s Tribun Network, the story of scaling from local newspapers to a national digital operation is best understood as a progression from geography to intelligence, according to Dahlan Dahi, CEO of Tribun Network at KG Media.

“Twenty years ago, the Internet connected billions of people,” Dahi said during a panel discussion. “Today, AI is connecting billions of pieces of knowledge.”

During the recent INMA Asia-Pacific News Media Summit, Dahi framed Indonesia’s scale as central to the challenge. The country spans 17,000 islands, is the world’s largest archipelago, is home to more than 1,340 ethnic groups speaking over 700 local languages, and has a population of over 286 million — making it the fourth most populous country on Earth.

With more than 229 million Internet users, Dahi described Indonesia as one of the world’s most vibrant digital markets.

From geography to network

Tribun Network began as local newspapers constrained by geography, Dahi said. A reader in Jakarta could not access the publisher’s newspaper in Medan. The Internet changed that by connecting previously separate local newsrooms into a single network, with each newsroom serving its own community through local reporters who understood their culture and perspective.

“Individually, they produce journalism,” Dahi said. “Together, they produce something much bigger.”

The company built an ecosystem called Tribun X, an app designed to unify its properties on a single platform. The Internet helped connect the network’s various local operations, turning what had been a collection of local outlets into a national network, Dahi said.

An ecosystem beyond news

Tribun’s ecosystem now extends beyond text-based news delivered through Web sites and newspapers to include video and live reporting, Dahi said. The company has also built a ticketing platform to help event participants register online, a marketplace connecting the network with local small and medium enterprises, and a social platform within Tribun X that allows users to express their identity and culture.

Engagement within this broader ecosystem has been strong, helping convert an offline audience into online communities, Dahi said.

From data to insight

As AI has begun reshaping how users discover news, Dahi said Tribun has had to rethink its role as a local publisher. The company’s challenge, he said, is no longer collecting data but connecting digital, print, and user interaction data into meaningful insight.

Every article consists of three key elements, Dahi said: people (who), place (where an event happens), and topic (what the news is about). Tribun built a platform called RIA, or Reader Insight Surfaces, to identify media sentiment from published articles and generate public sentiment across social media platforms, using what Dahi described as an entity-relationship engine to connect people, places, and topics into insights for each city.

For example, an article published on Tribun’s Web site generated media sentiment that was 56% positive. When the same article was distributed across social media, it generated 58% negative sentiment.

The discrepancy stemmed from a public figure’s comment on the story, which ran counter to public sentiment and caused it to “backfire,” Dahi said. He described the finding as valuable insight for both the newsroom and Tribun’s clients.

“Print was geographically separated,” Dahi said. “The Internet connected them, connecting the dots. And AI helps us find patterns among them.”

Four businesses, one network

Every successful local publisher today operates as multiple businesses simultaneously, Dahi said. Tribun maintains a traditional newsroom, reporting and publishing news, he said, but the more important task is turning individual articles — the “dots” — and the connections between them into knowledge, which AI can then convert into what he called an intelligence engine.

Dahi emphasised that trust remains the central principle of local journalism, and the insights generated through Tribun’s data systems must be trustworthy for both the newsroom and its clients to rely on them.

“Tribun is not building a larger media company,” Dahi said. “We are building what we believe is the next operating model for local journalism.”

He summarised the network’s evolution, explaining newspapers gave Tribun geography, which he said remains important for local nuance and perspective. The Internet gave it reach; its network gives it signal; and AI gives it the ability to turn that signal into intelligence.

Staying local while scaling nationally

Responding to a question about how Tribun avoids becoming generic as it scales nationally, Dahi said the company manages 42 Web sites. Its flagship site, TribunNews.com, represents a national perspective from reporters based in Jakarta, while local Web sites powered by local teams offer local perspectives on national stories, allowing the network to blend both.

Asked about the risk of AI and data setting the news agenda rather than journalists, Dahi called it fundamentally an ethical question. “We are journalists,” he said. “We use technology as tools to help us do our job ... the decision is in the human journalism.”

Asked what he would do differently if building a digital network from scratch today, Dahi said he would prioritise understanding AI and how it is reshaping the media ecosystem, rather than focusing primarily on search engines and social media as he once did.

What he said should never change is the core mission: “We are journalists. We serve the public.”

Banner photo: Adobe Stock by TensorSpark.

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