•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

For its July edition — only its third — IFmedia online magazine published a story on the indie band Monkey to Millionaire. Deviating from the common template of texts and photos, IFmedia, which stands for Indonesia’s Finest Media, presented the article in a multimedia concept.

Designed to resemble a magazine on the computer monitor, the article opens with a 15-second slideshow of black-and-white photos of the band, accompanied by an audio excerpt of their song “Strange is the Song in Our Conversation.”

Flip a few digital pages, and viewers can watch video interviews with band members and listen to four songs from the album “Lantai Merah” (“Red Floor”).

At the end of the article, the three-piece band performs two acoustic music video, filmed exclusively for IFmedia readers to enjoy.

“Print media is not the same as online media,” said Mirza Natadisastra, chief editor of IFmedia. “A print magazine is limited by width and length, the Internet has no space limitations.”

The multimedia online magazine integrates text, photos, audio and video in presenting its primarily feature articles, with its topics revolving around the realm of pop culture, arts and current affairs.

Previous articles have looked at Green Building Council Indonesia’s efforts to protect Jakarta’s environment, a story on four Jakarta citizens with often overlooked occupations and a profile on badminton star Liem Swie King.

IFmedia’s production team consists of five young Indonesians in their 20s who are enthusiastic about music and movies, so each edition includes at least one pop culture story. The May debut edition ran an article on Zeke, the composer for the movie “Fiksi” (“Fiction”). The following month featured a piece on the rise of horror movies in Indonesia.

On the arts scene, the online magazine has featured Japanese tattoo artist Yoshihito Nakano, catwalk model-cum-photographer Nicoline Patricia Malina and collaborative performing arts group Khuruksetra.

“We don’t want to be too ambitious,” Mirza said, explaining the selection of stories. “That’s why we want to cover these three topics first. We want to write on things that interest us.”

Mirza said the contents of the magazine were mostly targeted at readers aged 18 to 32.

Adimas Adiwoso, the chief technology officer, said they focused on features because, “If we go after real-time news, we won’t be able to compete with news sites like detik.com.

“If we want people to read our Web site, we have to find something that people rarely hear and see, and not the mainstream news. Small communities that have never been covered by other media.”

For now, the online magazine publishes monthly and features about five to six main articles in each edition. Mirza said they gradually want to make it a biweekly publication with more articles. To keep the readers tuned in frequently, IFmedia includes blogs that are updated on a daily basis.

Apart from the feature articles, Mirza said a main attraction of the magazine was its multimedia presentations.

The Liem Swie King article opened with an archival recording of a live radio broadcast announcing his third All England triumph in 1981.

“Lahirnya Budaya Berdarah” (“The Birth of Bloody Culture”), an article on the prevalence of horror flicks in Indonesia, included video interviews with directors and a producer, a trailer for upcoming horror movie “Macabre” and an interactive section featuring horror movie trivia.

“What we’re selling is the multimedia concept and the interactivity aspect,” Dimas said.

“We want the readers to come to our Web site not to just read an article, but to move their mouse and interact with it.”

In terms of preparing the articles, content producer Zio Stamboel said the publishing process spelled the difference between earlier online magazines and multimedia online magazines, as the latter goes beyond a two-dimensional medium.

“When we work on an article, we first brainstorm about the story angle, and then decide on the information flow in terms of the audio-visual design,” he said.

Mirza added, “We have to make sure that the text content doesn’t clash with the audio-visual content.

“Information can actually be designed in a creative and interesting way.”

All five of the brains behind IFmedia graduated from Australian universities, with majors in such fields as media production, journalism and information technology. As they neared graduation in 2008, the big question of “What should we do?” was asked whenever the group gathered.

As college students, the Internet was their entertainment solution whenever they didn’t have money to spend during their leisure time. “We were already accustomed to the Internet world,” Mirza said.

They were also aware that the Internet had been growing exponentially in Indonesia, he said. Publishing a magazine was one option they considered but they thought there might be too much competition in Indonesia.

“There are already a lot of print magazines [in Indonesia]. But the print magazine industry is declining. They’re dying.”

He said that a lot of print magazines had gone online but had retained the same format as in print. “They’re still text and photos.”

The friends decided to start an online magazine, as all had some lectures on multimedia during their tertiary education.

Mirza said he began working on the project just two days after returning to Indonesia last December. After testing the magazine offline for about five months, IFmedia was officially launched in May 2009.

But its founders were aware that running an online magazine in Indonesia would not be problem-free. The first issue they had to face was limited access to the Internet in a country where only a certain socioeconomic group has computers. “That’s why we’re targeting people who live in the big cities and have broadband access,” Mirza said.

Another problem, one that they anticipated far before coming up with their concept, was the country’s poor connectivity quality.

“But I think people are used to the slow Internet,” Mirza said.

The group saw the decision to launch IFmedia as an investment. “We’re very certain that the Internet world in Indonesia will keep on growing in the next three to five years,” Mirza said. “The Internet will become so much faster and cheaper.”

Although currently focusing solely on their online magazine, Pradipta Oetojo, general manager of IFMedia, said the group would eventually extend their application of the multimedia concept to different projects. “We have more ideas, and we want to explore further,” she said.

In the future, Mirza said, they want to be an all-encompassing online production team. “We want to create a new flow of information in Indonesia,” he said. “We want to provide a new experience.”