For the 23 years prior to its banning on June 21, 1994, Tempo magazine was Indonesia's most important news weekly, and its chief editor, Goenawan Mohamad, one of Indonesia's leading poets and intellectuals. Yet despite its influence, the history of Tempo magazine is not widely known. All aspects of Tempo's history, including its roots in the literary and cultural milieu of the 1960s, its economic organization and management, its internal culture and system of deciding what's news, and its strategies for survival within a repressive press system, provide a window into the political and cultural history of Indonesia's New Order.
