Bu Yuli is so full of passion with a strong sense of mission of sharing accurate information to the world. Her intellectual curiosity drives her to work albeit immense challenges, physically and emotionally.
In this episode, we talked about
- Her challenges as a journalist – from physical violence to personal trauma
- Civil war in Srilanka experience – her most difficult fieldwork going through land mines
- Breaking the barriers of culture – being a woman in a religious country
- The role of social media in journalism – how it should change to incorporate more accountability of misinformation, defamation, etc. and what is she currently doing to solve this
- Her advice to young people
“Looking forward we will live in a more globalized world, no longer the mentality of a village or kumpung or even a nation. We are globalizing, there will be no more borders. The fact that we can travel easily, communicate in seconds with somebody on the other side of the world.”
Yuli Ismartono is a journalist from Indonesia. She has been in media and communications for three decades. She worked for Tempo,the largest news weekly magazine in Indonesia since 1983 as a foreign correspondent covering Southeast Asia based in Bangkok, Thailand, until the magazine was banned by the New Order regime in 1994. Her assignments included covering conflicts and interviewing leaders in the region.
During Tempo’s ban, Ms Ismartono worked for the Jakarta-based TV company SCTV and did consulting work for a number of companies in the field of communications strategy. She rejoined Tempo magazine in 2001 when it started re-publishing following the start of Indonesia’s reform era. Her new job was chief editor of Tempo English, a unit of the newly-formed TEMPO Media Group. In May 2015, she became publisher of Tempo English, in charge of its overall management and operations. She retired in June 2017 and is now the co-founder and managing editor of AsiaViews, an online weekly regional magazine covering Southeast Asia.
Ms Ismartono sits on the board of a number of institutions, such as the Bali-based Coral Triangle Center, which assists in the capacity-building of tropical marine conservation managers and practitioners in seven countries of the Asia-Pacific. She also sits in the governing board of Prestasi Junior Indonesia (PJI), a foundation aimed at providing young Indonesians with extra-curricular training to value free enterprise, business and economics, by providing youths with school-to-work initiatives.
Overseas, for years she has been a board member of the Natural Resources Governance Institute (NRGI), an NGO dedicated to empowering civil society in resource-rich but economically poor countries to apply governance principles to their extractive industries
She has recently joined the board of directors of Geneva, Switzerland-based Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), a product development partnership in the field of antimalarial drug research and development, aimed at reducing malaria in disease-endemic countries by discovering, developing and facilitating delivery of new, effective and affordable antimalarial drugs.
She is also involved in Altsean-Burma, an NGO working to advocate democratic values and principles in Myanmar.
Ms Ismartono received her undergraduate studies in political science in New Delhi, India and her graduate studies in journalism at Syracuse, New York, USA.
She is a member of AJI (Alliance of Independence Journalists), the Jakarta Editors Club, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand and the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club.
Ms Ismartono is an Eisenhower Fellow.
Wisdoms Takeaway
- If you want to be a journalist, you need to expect some violence.
- To cope with mental stress, you would need a really strong support group. Whether it’s your family or friends.
- Luck, perseverance, and careful planning allowed her to become successful
- You can do whatever you want to do at any age
- What do you want to do, go get it!
- Find yourself in this world, if you don’t know what you want, you will go left and right missing all the great opportunities.