24 Oct 2002

Blasts get circulation racing

By Eric Ellis, Denapasar

PASEK Suardika was praying at a temple in Kuta when the terrorists attacked the Balinese city.
The deputy editor of Nusa, Bali's Bahasa Indonesia broadsheet daily newspaper, 32-year-old Pasek had just put it "to bed" before turning in himself. And now it was time to pray and enjoy his Sunday holiday, his one day off a week.
Nusa's weekend edition was unspectacular; some karate success from the Asian Games in Korea by Kontingen Merah Putih (Team Red White, for the Indonesian flag), a soft weekend feature about Arzeti, Indonesia's rising supermodel, and some local politics. It was normal soft weekend fare for the 80,000-circulation broadsheet, which competes with the more populist Bali Post for the mantle of the island's leading newspaper.
"I heard the bomb go off," Pasek recalls in Nusa's modest offices in suburban Denpasar. "It was very loud. I thought it was benzine."
He called two of his reporters, who happened to be staying at a Kuta hotel near the Sari Club as a reward for good work. They quickly raced to a scene of carnage, helping some people out of the inferno.
Pasek returned to his office, about 8km away from the temple. The first wire reports were filtering in, both in Bahasa and English. Pasek was also taking copy, phone to ear, called in from reporters at the scene, and at Sanglah Hospital, where bodies were piling up in the tropical night air.
By 12.30am Sunday, Pasek says, barely an hour after the bomb, he had remade the front page with a crude area map and a headline that read "Two Bombs Attack Bali" and sub-heads of "14 dead, 100s injured" and "Bomb was inside taxi outside SC [Sari Club] Kuta". It was impressive reporting with so few resources in such a chaotic scene.
The next days were rather less so for Western taste, and for the anxious relatives of dead and missing arriving at Bali's Ngurah Rai Airport who were handed copies of Nusa and Bali Post. Their pages were filled with graphic colour images of bodies and body parts, some easily recognisable to the relatives fretting for loved ones. Pasek makes no apology for running the pictures. "We Balinese deal with death in very different ways [from Westerners]."
The bombings were a circulation bonanza for Nusa, one of the many words for island in Bahasa Indonesia. Pasek says he ordered an extra 10 per cent on the print run for the Sunday edition. "By 8am we were all sold out," he says.
Pasek cranked up the run by another 40 per cent for Monday's paper, holding the same 140,000 run for Tuesday and Wednesday. By Thursday, interest waned to 120,000 but he expects to hold 90,000-to-100,000 for the next few weeks. Unusually for a Hindu island, Nusa is edited by a Muslim, with Christians, Hindus and Buddhists on staff in the mostly Hindu newsroom of 40 reporters.