Didi Nugrahadi, who famously founded Detik, is back with another media startup

Founder of Beritagar Didi Nugrahadi (right)

Two years ago, Tech in Asia reported on an Indonesian app that would let users follow their favorite news topics. But after the article ran, the app went into hibernation. The following two years were used for product development and beta testing. Finally, after 12 months in beta, Beritagar is now ready to launch.

Beritagar is an Indonesian news curator that uses hashtags to link users to related story topics. More than just an aggregator, Beritagar also condenses, summarizes, and rewrites content so as to package each article in no more than five paragraphs. The reason for this is that Beritagar’s founder Didi Nugrahadi believes there’s too much news on the web these days, and it’s easier for casual readers to consume media in smaller servings.

“Many things have transformed with the way we take in news,” explains Nugrahadi. “When technology allows us to share information, make the information, and distribute the information, it’s always very interesting to explore.” Nugrahadi is also a co-founder of Detik (acquired by Para Group in 2011), one of Indonesia’s most famous news portals.

See: Detik, Indonesia online portal news, is acquired with $60 million value?

Nugrahadi says Beritagar currently has five curators on staff. At the moment, a curator is responsible for finding several articles on the same news topic, summarizing them, then linking back to the original sources. When necessary, curators are encouraged to include a paragraph with their own personal opinions. However, Nugrahadi says he will soon employ bots to do the repetitive work, which should free up the writers to focus more on the human touch elements.

“By next month all the content will be provided by robots,” he explains. “The robots will feed the team and the team will rewrite.” It’s important to note that C3PO will not actually bring writers sandwiches in the office, but rather, online algorithms will gather published news clips for Beritagar’s writers to use for their summaries.

Nugrahadi says Beritagar currently has 200,000 monthly pageviews, and the operation has been funded up until this point by his friends. He did not mention the investors’ names, but Nugrahadi himself is a long-time media player in Jakarta. Apart from Detik, he co-founded three other companies, including local PR firm Inmark Digital. Nugrahadi says Beritagar will monetize via traditional advertising after the site receives ample traffic. It will officially come out of beta on a date to be determined next month.