Our promise to readers — and to the Indonesian journalists whose work informs ours.
Indonesia Chronicles follows more than thirty Indonesian news organizations — from Antara and Kompas to Tempo, Detik, CNN Indonesia, and Mongabay — every day. When one of them reports something the world should know, we tell that story for a global audience.
Every news story on this site is written from scratch in our own words. We work only from the facts of a report, add the background a reader outside Indonesia needs, and never reproduce another outlet's text or translate their articles. Facts belong to everyone; wording belongs to its writer — we respect both.
Every news story names the Indonesian outlet that reported it first and links to their original article. If our story made you curious, click through — supporting Indonesian journalism supports the truth about Indonesia.
Our Cerita Rakyat, Food, and Travel features are researched from Indonesian oral tradition, regional records, academic work, and public sources — then written as original essays. Where traditions vary between regions (and in Indonesia they always do), we tell the most widely known version and welcome corrections from communities who know their own stories best.
We are a small newsroom with big ambitions, so we use AI tools to help draft stories in our house style and to translate them into ten languages. Every story framework, source list, and editorial rule is set by our founder — and stories are reviewed by a human editor, with extra scrutiny for anything involving casualties, legal accusations, or statistics. Translated pages are marked as machine-assisted, with one click back to the English original.
Photography comes from free-license sources — Wikimedia Commons, Unsplash, and similar — credited in our image credits.
When we get something wrong, we fix it. Write to hend@indonesiachronicles.com and a human — usually the founder herself — will read it.
Indonesia Chronicles is founded and edited by Hend Farouk — an Egyptian scholar with master's degrees in Indonesian language and English linguistics, who speaks Indonesian fluently and believes the world's greatest untold stories are Indonesian.