(Photo: A crowd of some 40 supporters celebrates the supplement's Young Reader Award. Fourth from left in front row, Director Azrul Ananda holds the trophy.)

The daily youth supplement has proved that it is possible for a print newspaper to engage with a young community with great success.

The supplement is aimed towards the large market of young readers in Indonesia – 40% of the county’s population is under 30 years of age – and it does so by tapping into the huge numbers of young people interested in journalism.

DetEksi is staffed largely by university students, who work on a paid, part-time basis to produce a supplement that is made by young people for young people. The publication asks controversial questions of young people in regular surveys, posing questions like “When did you first start having sex?” and “Who do you hate most, Mom or Dad?”, to more than 1.7 million students over 11 years. This attitude sometimes attracted complaints, but in the words of the DetEski founder, “We kept going, we didn’t care”.

It worked.

DetEksi has a popular youth basketball league and runs a journalism convention and an annual birthday celebration that has become one of the biggest music events in Indonesia.

The brand is sponsored by several large companies, including Honda Motors, but refuses sponsorship from tobacco and alcohol companies. The paper can afford to be selective; the  brand is so big that DetEski can bring top professional basketball players from the USA to Indonesia and give students the chance to interview them.  

In short, DetEksi is a master class in how to cultivate a newspaper brand to engage young people.