About Us
Wisata Hits is an English-language news site about Indonesia and the countries around it. We publish for people who live in Jakarta, Surabaya, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, for readers elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and for Indonesians working abroad who still want to follow home in the language they now work in.
The site is independently owned and run by its founding editors, free to read, paid for by advertising, with no paywall and no political sponsor.
Why we started this
We came out of travel writing. Freelance destination copy, hotel round-ups, ferry and bus guides, work where the brief always arrived with the same instruction: keep it warm, and leave politics out of it. We wrote a lot of it. Some was even good.
What wore us down was the shape of Indonesia in English. Roughly 280 million people, and for most of the English-reading world the country appears as a wire story about an earthquake or a ferry that went down, then goes quiet until the next round-up of Bali beaches. The fuel subsidy argument that decides what a Surabaya delivery rider takes home never makes it out. Neither does a provincial election, a badminton final, a rupiah move that changes the price of imported rice, or a nickel smelter town in Sulawesi that English coverage has never bothered to name.
So we kept widening. A piece about the overnight ferry to Flores turned into a piece about who pays to dredge the harbour, which turned into the regional budget, which turned into a ministry in Jakarta. Travel kept collapsing into governance, because here it does. At some point we stopped calling ourselves a travel site with opinions and admitted we were simply covering the country.
The name stayed. Wisata hits is what people here call a spot that is trending, the caption under a photograph of a new waterfall or a freshly repainted alley in Semarang. Renaming ourselves something with “Post” or “Review” in it would have been a small lie about our own history, so we kept the slightly undignified one.
What we cover
National politics and the economy come first: the state budget, fuel and electricity subsidies, the rupiah, downstream mining policy, the courts, the police, and the regional elections that decide who runs provinces bigger than most European countries. Business and technology next, which here means the super-apps, the data centres going up on the edge of Jakarta, and the funding drought that ended a lot of jobs very quietly.
Then the rest of the beat, which is not decoration. Auto, because this is a motorcycle country before it is a car country, and the electric two-wheeler subsidy matters more than any SUV launch. Science, because we live on a subduction zone and readers need what the meteorology and geophysics agency actually said, not a screenshot of it. Sport, because badminton and the national football team stop traffic. Entertainment and gaming, because the film industry and the mobile game market are both bigger than outsiders assume. Lifestyle and travel, still, written by people who pay for their own rooms.
We also cover the neighbourhood: Singapore and Malaysia as trading partners and as places Indonesians go to work, ASEAN when it does something, haze when it crosses a border. And we write for a reader who does not already own the vocabulary. We spell out the acronym the first time, we convert rupiah, and we name the regency rather than the island. If a story turns on what a bupati can and cannot do, we explain that in the story.
How the day actually runs
The early shift starts before the Jakarta market opens, reading Indonesian-language sources from overnight: the wires, the ministry sites, the regional papers nobody translates. Mid-morning is press conference rhythm, one ministry after another, and a lot of standing around. Friday afternoons go quiet around prayers and come back late. Sport is a night job because the finals are. Our publishing clock is not an office clock, partly because many readers open the site at breakfast in London or after dinner in Sydney.
Every story is read by a second editor before it goes out. Hazard stories get a harder pass: we check the original Indonesian statement rather than an English summary of it, and we name the agency that issued it. That rule exists because we once broke it. Early on, during an eruption, we published an evacuation radius and the wrong regency, both lifted from an English aggregator that had garbled a briefing. We corrected it within the hour and it still bothers us, because the people most likely to read an evacuation story live nearest the mountain.
What we will not do
We do not take press trips. No free hotel nights, no tourism board junkets, no “content collaboration” with a resort or a property developer. That has cost us real money, because sponsored travel is most of the money in travel media here, and it has cost us access to launches we would have liked to see. We pay for the room and we say so.
We do not accept paid takedowns. The requests arrive regularly. Somebody wants a court story about a company quietly unpublished, and there is usually a figure attached. If we got something wrong, we will correct it and say we did. If we got it right, the answer is no, and the size of the offer does not change the answer.
We also do not publish sponsored articles dressed up as reporting. Commercial work is labelled at the top and is never written by the person who covers that beat as news. We do not sell interviews, trade coverage for event access, or run paid political influencer campaigns during election season, whatever they are called in the pitch deck. Our advertising terms list the categories we turn down.
Who owns us and where the money comes from
Ownership sits with the founding editors. There is no parent conglomerate above us, no outside investor with a board seat, no political party, no state agency and no foreign government money. Our ownership and funding page lists every revenue stream we have.
Advertising pays for the site: display placements and newsletter sponsorship, sold directly and through the programmatic exchanges, plus a little affiliate income on travel links, disclosed where it appears. Nobody on the commercial side sees a story before it publishes, and no advertiser gets a preview or a veto. When a story concerns an advertiser, we say so in the story.
When we get it wrong
We correct in public and leave the record visible. A correction notice says what was wrong, what it says now, and when we changed it. We do not silently edit a published piece and hope nobody kept a screenshot. Our corrections policy explains how to report an error, and our editorial standards cover sourcing, anonymity, right of reply and the line between reporting and comment.
Claims that travel fast get checked before we repeat them. Our fact-checking page describes that process, which works to the principles the International Fact-Checking Network publishes for its signatories, and what we do when a viral claim arrives as a screenshot with no origin.
Talking to us
One address reaches the newsroom: support@wisatahits.blog. Editors read and sort that inbox themselves, so tips, corrections, complaints and advertising enquiries all land in the same place and get routed by hand. Our contact page explains what to put in the subject line and how long each kind of message takes.
Tips are welcome in English or Indonesian, and documents are more useful than opinions about documents. If sending something could get you into trouble at work, note that ordinary email is not a safe channel. We would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
