About Minuto Uno

Minuto Uno

Minuto Uno, published online as Minutouno.com and also known by the short form M1, is a digital-native general-news portal based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is an online-only newspaper, written in Spanish and distributed nationally over the internet with free access, rather than the website of a print newspaper, a television channel or a radio station. Its owner is Grupo Indalo, one of Argentina's large privately held business groups, and it has long been described in reference sources as one of the most visited online newspapers in the country. The name itself, which translates as Minute One, captures the idea behind the project: news published continuously, minute by minute, as events develop.

As a generalist outlet, Minuto Uno covers the full breadth of the Argentine news agenda. Its core subjects are politics and the economy, alongside police and society news, sport, entertainment and show business, technology and wider stories from Argentina and the world. That breadth, combined with a publishing rhythm built for the internet rather than for a daily print deadline, has made it a familiar first stop for readers who follow Argentine news online. It sits in the generation of Argentine media that was born digital, grew up alongside social media and mobile reading, and never had to adapt a printed product to the web.

Founding in Buenos Aires in 2006

Minuto Uno was founded in October 2006 by Carlos Miguens and the veteran journalist Samuel Gelblung, widely known in Argentina as Chiche Gelblung. Gelblung was already one of the country's best-known media figures, with a long career in print journalism, radio and television behind him, and Minuto Uno represented his decisive move into online publishing at a moment when Argentina's internet news market was still taking shape. Reference records note that he registered the Minuto Uno trademark on 21 September 2006, shortly before the launch, and in August 2007 began the process of transferring the mark to the company Desarrollos Electronicos Informaticos S.A.

The timing matters for understanding what Minuto Uno is. In 2006, Argentina's established newspapers were still the dominant reference points for news, and their websites were largely extensions of their print editions. A portal founded from the start as a web-only operation, with no printing press, no paper distribution and no broadcast licence, was a different kind of proposition. Minuto Uno belonged to the first wave of Argentine outlets designed entirely around online consumption: short, frequently updated stories, a homepage that changed throughout the day, and headlines written to be found and shared on the internet.

The Gelblung Years and Early Growth

Gelblung directed Minuto Uno from its foundation until 2011. Under his direction the portal established itself as a generalist news site with a strong emphasis on immediacy, combining hard news on politics and the economy with the police, entertainment and human-interest coverage that had long been a hallmark of Gelblung's own journalistic style. The site's own slogan in this identity, recorded in reference listings, is Todas tus noticias, meaning all your news, a promise of completeness as well as speed.

The early years were not without the tensions that accompanied the rapid growth of digital newsrooms. In 2008, while the portal was still in Gelblung's hands, twelve employees were dismissed following a salary claim. The Ministry of Labour ordered compulsory conciliation and the company was required to reinstate them. The episode, documented in contemporary reporting and summarised in reference sources, is a small but telling part of the outlet's history: it shows a young digital newsroom already large enough to have organised staff disputes, operating under the same labour framework as Argentina's older media.

By the end of its first phase, Minuto Uno had achieved the visibility that would make it attractive to a larger group. Archived Alexa rankings cited in reference sources placed it as the 41st most visited website in Argentina overall, and it was consistently described as one of the country's most visited online newspapers. For a site with no print circulation and no broadcast signal of its own, that position demonstrated how far a purely digital brand could travel in Argentina in the space of a few years.

Sale to Grupo Indalo in 2011

In 2011 Gelblung sold Minuto Uno to Grupo Indalo, the conglomerate led by businessman Cristobal Lopez. The purchase was reported at the time, on 20 October 2011, by La Politica Online under a headline noting that Cristobal Lopez had bought Minuto Uno and was deepening his entry into the media business. The Media Ownership Monitor, the research project that maps media ownership in Argentina, likewise records simply and directly that in 2011 Grupo Indalo purchased the news portal Minuto Uno.

The sale placed Minuto Uno at the start of a much larger expansion. According to the Media Ownership Monitor, Grupo Indalo had been established in the early 2000s as a group of companies led by Cristobal Lopez from his home province of Chubut, initially active mainly in sectors such as transport, casinos and gambling, and oil and fuel. The group entered media in 2010, buying radio stations, a newspaper, a magazine and a television channel in Comodoro Rivadavia. Minuto Uno, bought the following year, was its first major national digital news acquisition in Buenos Aires. In 2012 the group's media expansion accelerated further when it bought Daniel Hadad's five radio stations and his news channel C5N, and in later years it added production companies and took major stakes in the newspapers Ambito Financiero and The Buenos Aires Herald.

For Minuto Uno, joining Indalo meant moving from an independently owned start-up founded by a single famous journalist to the digital flagship inside a diversified conglomerate. The portal kept its name, its web address and its generalist identity, but from 2011 onward its fortunes have been tied to those of the group around it, including the group's other newspapers, radio stations and television channel.

Ownership, Headquarters and Leadership

Minuto Uno's headquarters are in the City of Buenos Aires. Reference listings give its address as Avenida Cordoba 657, eighth floor, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and the Media Ownership Monitor also lists Avenida Cordoba 657 in Buenos Aires as the contact address for Grupo Indalo. That shared Buenos Aires base underlines the portal's position at the centre of the group's media operations, in the national capital where Argentina's government, courts, markets and major cultural and sporting institutions are concentrated.

Reference listings name Jorge Garcia as the portal's director and Grupo Indalo as its owner. At group level, the Media Ownership Monitor records Cristobal Lopez as the group's founder and majority owner, with a 70 percent holding, and Carlos Fabian de Sousa as minority shareholder with 30 percent, noting that de Sousa manages the group's media businesses. The Monitor describes Indalo as a private joint stock corporation whose parent company is Inversora M and S, with business interests extending well beyond media into oil, food production, construction, hospitality and other sectors.

Reference works also classify the portal's editorial orientation, listing its political ideology as Kirchnerismo, the current of Argentine politics associated with the governments of Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. That classification, recorded in its standard reference entry, reflects how the outlet has been categorised by observers of the Argentine media system during the Indalo period, and it forms part of the public record readers and researchers use when placing Minuto Uno within the country's politically plural but sharply divided news landscape.

News Coverage and Editorial Sections

Minuto Uno is organised as a generalist news service, and its homepage on any given day shows the mix that defines it. Politics is a leading section, covering the national government, Congress, the parties, provincial politics and Argentina's place in the world. The economy is covered as a daily, practical subject as well as a political one, reflecting how closely questions of prices, work, money and public services shape everyday life in Argentina and how much of the national political argument is conducted through them.

Alongside those core beats, the portal publishes extensive society and police news, the strand of reporting known in Argentina as policiales, covering crime, the courts, accidents and the human stories behind the headlines. Sport is another major pillar, with football at its centre, as it is for almost every Argentine general-news outlet, together with other sports and the business and politics that surround them. Entertainment and show business, listed on the site under espectaculos, cover television, film, music, celebrity news and cultural events. Technology also features among the portal's established subject areas. The result is a single destination that aims to serve a reader's whole news day, from a development in Congress to a football result to a story from the world of television, without requiring that reader to move between specialist sites.

The portal's own current presentation confirms that breadth. Its homepage headline promises the latest news from Argentina, entertainment and sport, and the stories it promotes move constantly between political coverage, society reporting, sport and show business. That structure is consistent with the description under which the outlet has long been catalogued: a general-news portal covering politics, economy, police news, sport and entertainment with continuous updating.

A Digital-Native Publishing Model

The defining feature of Minuto Uno is not only what it covers but how it publishes. It has no print edition, no fixed daily closing time and no broadcast schedule. News is posted as it is confirmed and stories are updated, replaced and re-promoted throughout the day, so that the homepage a reader sees in the morning may be substantially different by the evening. This continuous model, present from its 2006 launch, is what distinguishes a digital-native portal from a newspaper that later built a website: the internet is not a secondary channel for Minuto Uno, it is the only channel.

Access is free over the internet, in Spanish, for a national audience in Argentina and for Argentine and Spanish-speaking readers abroad who follow the country's news. Distribution, as reference listings put it, is via the internet alone. In practice that has meant building an audience through search, direct visits and social sharing rather than through newsstand sales or subscriptions, and writing and presenting stories in the forms that travel online: clear headlines, rapid updates on developing stories, photography and video alongside text, and constant renewal of the front page around the stories readers are following most closely at any given hour.

Part of the Indalo Media Family

Within Grupo Indalo, Minuto Uno does not stand alone. Reference sources list its sister digital outlets as including Rating Cero, the entertainment news site, together with El Patagonico, the newspaper from Comodoro Rivadavia in Chubut, and Diario Registrado. Those titles publish material from the portal, even though they do not provide direct access routes from Minuto Uno's own pages. The Media Ownership Monitor's listing of the group's online outlets similarly places minutouno.com alongside diarioregistrado.com, ratingcero.com, elpatagonico.com and ambito.com, the site of Ambito Financiero.

The connections extend to radio and television. The streaming services of the group's Buenos Aires radio stations, Radio 10, Pop Radio 101.5, Mega 98.3 and Radio One 103.7, have been aligned with the portal's page, and the group's current homepage continues to present its radio brands alongside its news. The television news channel C5N and the radio station Vale 97.5 also belong to the group, although reference sources note they have not had a direct access route from the Minuto Uno page itself. For readers, the practical effect of this structure is that a story can move across the group's platforms, from the portal to radio and television and back again, while Minuto Uno remains the group's most direct point of contact with the online news audience.

Minuto Uno on Television

The clearest example of that cross-platform life is the television programme that carries the portal's name. Since August 2014, the cable news channel C5N has broadcast a programme called Minuto Uno, explicitly referencing the website. The programme is hosted by the journalist Gustavo Sylvestre, with panellists who have included Juan Amorin, Irina Hauser, David Cufre and Pedro Brieger, according to reference sources.

The programme gave the digital brand a nightly presence in prime-time cable television, extending a name born on the web into a medium its founders had worked in long before the internet. Reference sources note that from 2019 the programme was considered the most watched programme on Argentina's cable news channels. That trajectory, from website to flagship television title, is unusual in Argentine media, where brands more commonly travel in the opposite direction, and it underlines the weight the Minuto Uno name had acquired inside its group within a decade of the portal's launch.

Role in Argentine Digital Journalism

Minuto Uno's place in Argentine journalism is also institutional. On 21 June 2016, in Buenos Aires, the owners and responsible editors of a group of digital outlets signed the founding act of the Asociacion de Periodismo Digital, the Association of Digital Journalism, known by its Spanish initials APD. Minuto Uno was a founding member. In the association's first leadership, published at its formation, the presidency went to Ignacio Fidanza of La Politica Online, and one of the two vice-presidencies went to Patricio Malagrino representing minutouno.com. The other founding leadership positions were held by representatives of MDZ, Letra P, La Brujula 24, Diario Veloz, 0223 and Urgente24, a cross-section of the national and provincial digital-native press.

The founding document set out why those outlets believed they needed a body of their own. It argued for equal conditions and opportunities for digital media, for the protection of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and for professional, quality journalism practised under firm ethical values, under the stated aim of more freedom, more independence and more quality. It presented news portals collectively as a counterweight to the large traditional media groups and as guarantors of the plurality of information that democracy requires. Minuto Uno's presence among the founders, with one of its representatives in a vice-presidential role, places it formally among the outlets that defined digital journalism in Argentina as a sector in its own right, distinct from print and broadcasting.

Taken together, that history explains the portal's durability. Founded in 2006 by one of Argentina's most recognisable journalists, sold in 2011 to a rising conglomerate, extended onto television in 2014 and represented among the founders of the digital press association in 2016, Minuto Uno has passed through each stage of the Argentine internet's development while keeping the same basic proposition: general news from Buenos Aires, in Spanish, free to read, and updated minute by minute. In a media system still dominated in public debate by much older newspaper and broadcast brands, it remains one of the clearest examples of a news outlet that the internet itself created.