About El Once Paraná

El Once Paraná

El Once Paraná is a free-to-air television station serving Paraná, the capital of Entre Ríos Province in Argentina, and much of the province beyond. Broadcasting as Canal 11 of Paraná and branded El Once, it began transmissions on 2 May 1992, founded by Edgardo Sánchez, and has grown into one of the most influential regional media of the Argentine Litoral, combining its television signal with elonce.com, a news portal that began in 2003 as the first internet news site in Entre Ríos. The university faculty of the province, marking the channel's thirtieth anniversary, described a station that had become an important local and regional medium, expanding its reach with its online portal and live transmission on YouTube, with programmes nominated and awarded at the Martín Fierro Federal, the Entre Ríos telecommunications association and the ETER prizes.

What distinguishes El Once in the accounts of those who worked there is closeness. A graduate who joined the channel in 1994 recalled research concluding that viewers had a particular bond with it: residents, organisations and officials, before calling the police, the municipality or the fire brigade, called Canal Once. The station's first slogan arose from that role, a medium close to the people, from which neighbours wanted the weather of their own city, the payment dates of municipal and provincial workers and news of the accident on their own corner, not events in a Buenos Aires plaza. That founding idea, television as a neighbourhood service for a provincial capital, still defines the station.

Overview

El Once is an over-the-air station licensed in Paraná and seen across most of Entre Ríos Province according to its official identification, as well as in neighbouring Santa Fe. It is an independently owned regional channel, associated with the Federal Comunicación enterprise that also created its digital portal and its charitable foundation. Its signal is carried in high definition on cable systems across Entre Ríos, Corrientes and Santa Fe through the provincial cable association, on the national Flow platform, and since 2021 on digital terrestrial television on channel 36.1 for Paraná, Santa Fe and surroundings. Its website, elonce.com, is among the most followed regional media sites of the Litoral, as the directory record for this profile notes.

History

The channel was founded by Edgardo Sánchez and began its transmissions on 2 May 1992, making it a late entrant by the standards of Argentine provincial television, most of whose stations date from the 1960s. Paraná had previously depended on channels from Santa Fe, across the Paraná River, and from Buenos Aires, with the province's own public Canal 9 arriving in the 1980s. Canal Once was created to fill the space of a commercial local channel for the capital, and it built its audience on proximity: the telephone number viewers called with their news, remembered by its journalists as a necessity for neighbours, became part of the station's folklore.

The channel's institutional weight was visible by 2000, when members of the National Congress formally expressed concern and sought to require the cable operator Multicanal Paraná to keep retransmitting the local Canal 11, after the operator excluded it from its grid. The episode, recorded in the congressional record of June 2000, showed that within eight years of its launch the station had become an asset the city's representatives defended in the national parliament. Through the 1990s and 2000s the station also became a training ground for the province's journalists: from 1994 it received interns from the Faculty of Education Sciences of the National University of Entre Ríos under an institutional agreement, and its graduates and presenters went on to staff media across the region.

The digital chapter began early. Its news portal, originally called El Once Digital, was launched on 27 March 2003 at 7 a.m. and was the first internet news portal in Entre Ríos Province. In 2013 the portal's name was changed to elonce.com. On 2 December 2004 Federal Comunicación and non-governmental organisations founded Once por Todos, a charitable foundation associated with the channel, dedicated to rehabilitation services for children, adolescents and adults in the province, an institutional expression of the station's community role. The station's television signal modernised in step: its HD signal launched in September 2018, and its thirtieth anniversary in 2022 was marked by the provincial university as the milestone of an established regional medium.

Ownership

El Once is independently owned, associated with Federal Comunicación, the enterprise recorded as founder of its digital portal and co-founder of its foundation. In a national landscape increasingly consolidated into Buenos Aires groups, an independent station of this scale in a provincial capital is increasingly rare. Its independence underwrites its editorial identity: its content is a mix of its own production and canned programming from other channels and producers of the province, as reference listings describe, rather than the feed of a single national network.

Programming

The station broadcasts its own productions together with programming from other provincial channels and producers, and streams its news and general interest programmes live on YouTube. Documented regular programmes include El Despertador, on weekday mornings from 6 to 9; Nunca es Tarde, on weekday mornings from 9 to 11; and Mediodía de Noticias at midday on weekdays. The grid is weighted, as its history predicts, toward news and general interest across the whole day, the formats through which a proximity channel performs its service: waking the city, accompanying the morning, and reporting the midday news of Paraná and the province.

News operation

News is the station's core, on air and online. The television newsroom produces the morning and midday services and the station's general interest programmes, while elonce.com operates as a continuous digital newspaper for Entre Ríos, carrying provincial politics, police and court news, sport and community information in real time. The interdependence of the two is the station's model: stories gathered for the portal feed the bulletins, and the bulletins drive the portal's audience. The testimony collected by the university underlines the newsroom's civic function in Paraná, where for decades the channel's number has been, for many residents, the first call in an emergency and the first source for the practical information of daily life, weather, wages and street-level incidents.

Distribution and reach

The station's over-the-air signal covers Paraná and is seen in most of Entre Ríos. Its HD signal, launched in September 2018 through the Gigared grid under ISDB-T, reached Paraná, Santa Fe, Santo Tomé, Crespo, Coronda and surrounding areas, and its Full HD version subsequently reached all of Entre Ríos, Corrientes and Santa Fe through the Asociación Entrerriana de TV. Since 26 August 2021 the channel has also been available on the Televisión Digital Abierta on channel 36.1, covering Paraná, Santa Fe and surroundings. On 5 April 2024 its signal on Flow moved to high definition on channel 32, having previously been on channel 541 in standard definition, for Paraná, Gualeguaychú, Gualeguay, Concepción del Uruguay and Federación. Live streaming on YouTube carries its news programmes worldwide, completing a distribution system that spans terrestrial, cable, national platform and open internet.

Digital presence

Digital is not an adjunct for El Once; it is half of the institution. Elonce.com began in 2003 as El Once Digital, the first internet news portal in Entre Ríos, and was renamed in 2013. It is described in the directory record for this profile as one of the most followed regional media sites in the Litoral, and the station's social presence shows a correspondingly large community, with its official Facebook page registering hundreds of thousands of followers in published counts. The slogan associated with the portal, Todas nuestras voces, All Our Voices, states the same proximity doctrine as the channel's first television slogan, translated for the internet age.

Audience and significance

El Once's significance lies in demonstrating that a late, independent, locally owned station could still build a dominant position in a provincial market at the end of the analogue century, and then convert that position into digital leadership, launching its province's first news portal in 2003 and reaching its thirtieth anniversary with regional awards recognition at the Martín Fierro Federal and other prizes. For Paraná it is both a television channel and a civic institution, complete with a charitable foundation, a parliamentary defence of its cable carriage in its record, and a generation of the province's journalists trained in its newsroom.

El Once today

Today El Once Paraná continues from the provincial capital as an independent generalist channel for Paraná and Entre Ríos, with strong local news on air and through elonce.com, HD distribution across three provinces and live programming on YouTube. Founded in 1992 to be the medium close to the people of its city, it remains, by the testimony of its own journalists and its university, exactly that.