ABSTRACT The government built Satu Data Indonesia (SDI) as part of implementing the principle of open government. Through SDI, all data from the government from in Indonesia including data from government agencies can be easily accessed by visiting the data.go.id website. This situation should be a good ecosystem to develop data journalism in Indonesia, because the government provides abundant data. This study aims to see the implementation of SDI from the perspective of data journalists. Data journalist is a profession that is directly related to SDI, they are tasked with managing data to be presented to the public in a simple and easy-to-understand manner for the general public. By interviewing data journalists from Katadata and Lokadata (two online media who declare themselves as data journalism), this qualitative research is expected to provide constructive input on the implementation of One Data Indonesia. In general, the existence of SDI is appreciated by data journalists. But data journalists from Katadata and Lokadata do not use SDI as part of their news-seeking activities. They see SDI has  basic problems, the lack of data availability, data relevance problems, problems with easy data access, no data updates (updates) to data reliability. In addition, problems with data updating and data reliability, on the other hand, not all regions in Indonesia are connected to SDI. As a result, data journalists do not use Satu Data Indonesia as an instrument to make news. They prefer to dig up data through data mining on the internet and collect data gradually in their data bank for processing at a later date.   Keywords: One Data Indonesia, Open Government, Online Media, Data Journalism

With the existence of open data, journalists have additional investigative tools to report on issues in the public interest and to hold the government to account. However, it remains outside the mainstream of journalism due to the limitation to access and work with data. The open data initiative in Indonesia has started since 2010. Adhering to UU No. 14 Tahun 2008 about Public Information Openness, Indonesia has implemented an open data portal, called Satu Data Indonesia in 2019. There are indeed a handful of studies that examine the implementation of open data portals in Indonesia. However, only a few studies have given attention to how data journalists are using these data and their perceptions about the quality of data provided by the government. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach and collects data through semi-structured in-depth interviews. It is intended to see the process on how data journalists in Indonesia turn data to news stories. By studying Lokadata.id and Katadata.co.id, we found that data provided by the authority sources (government) are still the main sources for data journalists in Indonesia. Despite the fact that the quality of data is getting better, most journalists in this study argued that the government’s open data has not yet integrated and has no basic standard that is collectively used. Therefore, the verification process and data processing in each media is important. The most common ways that journalists use to verify the data are by exploring the raw data, contacting the institution that provided the data, and considering the reputation of the data sources. However, there is a tendency of data journalists to be passively relying on official sources and ‘hide behind’ the perceived credibility of their sources.