Insights for publishers: KG Media on staying competitive in the digital era

In a world of rapidly emerging technologies, news organizations face challenges in retaining their competitive edge.

We spoke to Kompas Gramedia Group to find out how they remain competitive in the digital era.

Andy Budiman: We're a media group that is born and raised in a print media industry so you can imagine the scale of disruption that we're facing. We’re seeing an emergence of the middle class growing in Indonesia, and not only in big cities but throughout Indonesia in second and third tier cities and they are all hungry for internet connections, they're all hungry for accessing news online. So there is a lot of opportunity to reach these new, connected, technical savvy consumers.

Building business resilience and accelerating growth

Andy Budiman: So what we're doing now is performing what we call dual transformation. The first transformation is to transform our traditional print media business to becoming a more resilient business in this challenging time while the second transformation is how to accelerate new growth engine, especially in digital, to be able to replace what was lost from print.

Andy Budiman: We have rockstar journalists but to be able to grow in the future we also need to excel in technology so that means data machine learning capabilities are keys to our growth in the future and these capabilities happen to be the strongest at Google. So we hope that Google can diffuse more of this knowledge to media companies.

Developing new capabilities for the digital era

Andy Budiman: We do cross-unit trainings on best practices from each of our digital asset to share their common and best practices among each other. We also just integrated our sales team: print and digital and all together to be able to accelerate the digital transformation of our business team and now we have started a new unit to focus solely on the development of machine learning technology for advertising technology.

Working closely with technology partners

Andy Budiman: A lot of media companies face sustainability issues. Google and media companies are competitors on the commercial front but we actually have interlinked roles. Media companies create content and Google is working to make it more accessible. We can reach and engage larger amount of audiences. That means we can extend our influence and we can extend our purpose of enlightening the nation into the future.