About El Doce

El Doce

El Doce is the television station broadcasting on channel 12 from the city of Córdoba, Argentina, and the most popular television channel in Córdoba, the country's largest city after Buenos Aires. Founded in 1960 and launched on 18 April 1960, it was the first television station in Córdoba and the second to launch in Argentina as a whole. An affiliate of El Trece, it is operated by Grupo Clarín through Artear, which holds 85.185 percent of its licensee, Telecor S.A.C.I. Its headquarters are at Avenida Fernando Fader 3469 in Córdoba. Most of its schedule relays programming from El Trece in Buenos Aires, but its identity rests on what it makes itself: strong local news and an agricultural programme that has aired for decades.

The station began life not as channel 12 but as channel 13, a historical quirk that still shapes how older Córdoba viewers remember it. Across more than six decades it has passed from local founders to the country's largest media group, from black and white to colour to digital terrestrial channel 27.1, while remaining the reference point of Córdoba television. Media Ownership Monitor research records an audience share of 21 percent for the channel, the highest of any station in its market.

Overview

El Doce is a free-to-air regional television station whose coverage extends across Córdoba Province, with a repeater in Catamarca extending its signal into the neighbouring province. Reference accounts also describe carriage and availability well beyond that core area through cable and satellite. Its programming combines the network schedule of El Trece, Argentina's second national network, with locally produced news bulletins and local programmes. The channel broadcasts on digital terrestrial television as signal 27.1, assigned by the Federal Audiovisual Communication Services Authority in 2015.

The station's local production is concentrated where it matters most in regional television: news. Its bulletins, including Noticiero Doce and its Telenoche edition, are produced in Córdoba for Córdoba, and its agricultural magazine Agroverdad has served the province's farming audience for decades. In a country whose national media are concentrated in Buenos Aires, El Doce is the leading example of a provincial station with the scale and continuity to set its own city's agenda.

History

The station was launched on 18 April 1960 as LU1-H TV Canal 13, the first Córdoba-based television station, at the very beginning of Argentine television's expansion beyond Buenos Aires. National histories of Argentine television record 18 April 1960 as the start of broadcasting of Córdoba's Canal 12, making it the second network to launch in the country after the earliest Buenos Aires services began. Its first logo showed the image of an indigenous person within a white circle, with the call letters LU1H and the word Córdoba in a Greek-inspired typeface.

On 10 October 1963 the station was renamed LV 81 TV Canal 12, adopting the channel number it has kept ever since and introducing its most iconic logo, a large stylised spiral with the number 12 in serif type. On 1 May 1980 the station began regular colour broadcasts. The spiral identity, later rendered in yellow, remained the station's emblem until the change of ownership at the turn of the century, making it one of the longest-lived channel identities in Argentine television.

The Artear acquisition

In 2000 Artear, the Grupo Clarín subsidiary that operates El Trece, acquired control of the station. The transactions proceeded in stages: on 25 February 2000 Artear acquired 50.185 percent of the shares of Telecor S.A., the station's licensee, from Sociedad Argentina de Medios S.A. and José María Buccafusca, and on 16 March of the same year it acquired a further 35 percent from Arón Braver, one of the channel's founders, and Francisco Quiñonero. Media Ownership Monitor records Artear's resulting stake as 85.18 percent of Telecor, with Quiñonero retaining around 14.8 percent of the capital.

The acquisition integrated Córdoba's leading station into the Clarín group and aligned it fully with El Trece, whose programming it had long carried as an affiliate. On 17 July 2000 the station was rebranded in the style of Canal Trece of the time: the old spiral gave way to an orange-gold whirlpool, the numeral was dropped and the name rendered as canal doce in lowercase italics. Successive redesigns followed in 2002 and 2005, and the branding settled into its modern form from 2010, while the name El Doce, the way Córdoba viewers naturally refer to their channel, became the station's public identity.

Ownership

El Doce is owned through Telecor S.A.C.I., whose shares belong 85.185 percent to Artear, Arte Radiotelevisivo Argentino S.A., of Grupo Clarín. Grupo Clarín's board manages Artear, and the station is accordingly classified as private, commercial and free-to-air, with active transparency in Media Ownership Monitor's assessment, the company informing proactively about its ownership. The remaining minority stake descends from the founding families, a common pattern in Argentine provincial television, where local founders sold control to national groups while retaining a residual share.

The ownership gives the station a dual character. It is simultaneously a Clarín network asset, commercially represented within Argentina's largest media group, and a local institution founded by Córdoba businessmen in 1960. Its newsroom answers to Córdoba's reality daily, while its schedule, technology and strategy are set within the Artear system that also runs El Trece, Todo Noticias and the group's other regional stations.

Programming

Most of El Doce's programming consists of repeats and relays of El Trece programming from Buenos Aires: the network's fiction, entertainment and national news. The exceptions are the point of the station. Its locally produced news bulletins anchor the schedule at the hours when Córdoba audiences most need their own information, covering provincial politics, the city, crime, traffic, weather and sport, including the fortunes of the city's great football clubs, Talleres and Belgrano, and Instituto.

The other great exception is agricultural programming. Agroverdad, the programme described by the station's chroniclers as the agricultural show that has been airing for decades, began on Córdoba television on 16 March 1985, moved between the city's channels and has been broadcast on Canal 12 since 2002. Directed journalistically since its beginnings by Juan Carlos Vaca, it grew from a Saturday programme into a daily market micro within the midday news and an early-morning edition, and it also participates in the national Canal Rural signal. Its presence in the schedule expresses Córdoba's character as a farming province whose capital city serves a vast agricultural interior.

News operation

El Doce's news operation is the core of its local leadership. Its bulletins, among them Noticiero Doce and Telenoche, are produced entirely in Córdoba, and its digital operation through eldoce.tv extends that journalism around the clock. In a provincial market, the leading station's newsroom is often the largest television news-gathering organisation outside Buenos Aires, and its coverage of provincial government, courts, emergencies and weather events becomes the common reference for the city's other media.

The station's 21 percent audience share, recorded by Media Ownership Monitor from Kantar IBOPE data, reflects the strength of that combination: the entertainment power of a national network schedule joined to news that no Buenos Aires channel can replicate. Provincial viewers choose the station that shows them their own streets, and El Doce has organised its production to ensure the most valuable hours of the day do exactly that.

Distribution and reach

The station's terrestrial signal covers most of Córdoba Province through its transmitter and repeater network, with a repeater in Catamarca. It broadcasts digitally on channel 27.1. Beyond its home territory, El Doce is available on cable and satellite systems in other Argentine provinces and, according to profile accounts of the station, in a number of other locations reached by those platforms. Its website and streaming presence make its news and programmes available nationally and internationally.

That reach matters because Córdoba's diaspora within Argentina is large, and because the province's agricultural and university life draws people from across the centre and north of the country. The station functions as a link between the province and those who have left it, as well as the daily screen of those who remain.

Significance

El Doce is significant on three levels. Historically, it is a founding station of Argentine television, launched in 1960 when the medium was new in the interior of the country. Commercially, it is the strongest provincial station in Argentina, the leader of the country's second market and a central asset of the Artear regional system alongside stations in Bahía Blanca, General Roca and Bariloche. Civically, it is Córdoba's television institution: the channel whose news the province watches and whose agricultural programme has accompanied its farmers since 1985.

From its first identity as Canal 13 with an indigenous emblem, through the spiral of Canal 12, to the Artear whirlpool and the modern El Doce brand, the station's history mirrors that of Argentine television itself: local beginnings, family ownership, national consolidation and digital transition. Throughout, its proposition has remained constant and local. Córdoba watches El Doce because El Doce, first of all, shows Córdoba.