Hello Paul,
Perhaps I can answer most of your questions (from your email) here.
First of all, I appreciated your clearly comprehensive analysis of many of the top lines of news in Indonesia. Really, you wrote on half a dozen topics, and they all read interestingly.
Your main questions were about press credentials and compensation.
Press credentials:
I will paste here a section from our yet-unpublished aid to citizen/beginner journalists:
Do photojournalists need a press pass to take photos of anything? Do jounralists need a press pass to ask questions?
It is important to realize that you do not need a press "credential" to take pictures or cover events in public places (streets, parks, sidewalks that are not closed off to public access). You do not need government approval to work as a journalist, although it may be beneficial to obtain a 鈥淧ress ID鈥 or an official government-issued press credential for other reasons. Press credentials related to news coverage are usually issued by law enforcement agencies. Requirements for the issuance of credentials are established by those agencies and vary by department. One agency may not recognize the privileges granted by the credentials from another department. Event specific press credentials are usually provided by the organizers of the event, i.e. major league sports, concerts, festivals, press conferences, corporate meetings.
That is to say, you do not need press credentials to photograph or ask questions (in the US--some countries may vary in this regard). We will give you press credentials, but those credentials are merely a token that you are reporting for The Speaker, and we will vouch for that if they check.
No news agency can give a press pass that will give you access to places that issue their own passes (almost everything you would want a press pass for). Think of your press pass as a drivers licence or business card.
Compensation:
At The Speaker, everyone gets the same. That is, if the articles bring in money (through advertising) by attracting a lot of page views, we give this to the person responsible. The money that comes in goes out. Although this is better than many larger publications in some ways (for example, the biggest organizations such as The Guardian UK don't pay the majority of their writers anything, no matter what their articles do, as I understand), this is usually a modest amount. Journalism is not something people get into for money.
All of us do it because we want to. That is why we aim to publish the things that people care about enough to write about them (or photo document them). Keep in mind that this is a benefit as far as we are concerned--we work among a group of people who are the sort that devote themselves to things that they care about. I don't know what sort of group is better to be part of on this earth.
Some of the things you mentioned (expenses for gaining access, etc) are things associated with what is called investigative journalism. I don't know how many investigative journalists there are in the world, but it is certainly a small percentage of journalists. If you can imagine paying yearly salaries to bring in a half dozen or a dozen stories, you can imagine the scale of news organization that finance this. Mashable, which is worth multi-millions and has 20 million unique viewers every month, just hired its first few such journalists. You could also imagine the type of selection process for applicants to this kind of job.
I hope you do decide to write something, though. I liked even the writing you did in your email, and I think you would be cut out for it, if you so chose.