About ADNSUR

ADNSUR

ADNSUR is an independent digital-native news outlet based in Comodoro Rivadavia, in Chubut Province, Argentine Patagonia. Founded in 2012 by journalist Ana Tronfi, it publishes in Spanish at adnsur.com.ar and covers local and regional news for Argentine Patagonia, with documented audience leadership in the provinces of Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego according to SembraMedia and Comscore data. In 2023 it launched the streaming television channel SETA TV, in 2024 it obtained certification under the Journalism Trust Initiative, and in January 2025 it joined the Federal Network of innovative journalism launched by the fact-checking organisation Chequeado. It is one of the most institutionally recognised independent digital outlets in southern Argentina.

Foundation in Comodoro Rivadavia

ADNSUR was founded in 2012 in Comodoro Rivadavia by the journalist Ana Tronfi. The timing and the place are both significant. By 2012, digital-native publishing had proved itself in Argentina's largest cities, and the model was spreading to the interior; in Patagonia, however, the media landscape was still dominated by legacy newspapers and broadcasters owned by regional groups. An independent, online-only newsroom founded by a journalist in Comodoro Rivadavia was a deliberate bet that the south's largest city could sustain professional digital journalism of its own.

The name itself declares the territory: ADN, the Spanish initials for DNA and a common shorthand for identity, joined to SUR, the south. The outlet's identity is Patagonian in the same way that its city is: Comodoro Rivadavia, founded in 1901 as a port on the San Jorge Gulf and transformed from 1907 by the discovery of oil, is the largest city of Chubut and the commercial and service capital of the San Jorge Basin, Argentina's historic oil region. A newsroom there covers an economy and a society shaped by petroleum, by the wind and distances of Patagonia, and by migration from the rest of Argentina drawn by oil wages.

Coverage: the capital of the southern agenda

ADNSUR covers local news for Argentine Patagonia from its Comodoro Rivadavia base. Its home agenda includes the municipality and the life of the city and its neighbourhoods; the oil and gas industry of the San Jorge Basin, whose investment, employment and labour disputes structure the regional economy; provincial politics in Chubut; courts and police news; the university and health systems that serve the south; and the weather, roads and distances that dominate daily life in Patagonia. Beyond Chubut, its documented audience leadership extends across Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego, and its coverage follows the shared Patagonian agenda: energy, fishing, tourism, the environment, infrastructure and the region's permanent negotiation with a distant federal capital.

That southern scale is the outlet's defining characteristic. Patagonia contains Argentina's largest provinces and smallest population densities; its cities are separated by hundreds of kilometres of steppe, and its news has historically been mediated by Buenos Aires or by provincial capitals of the north of the region. A digital native based in the south's largest urban economy, read across three southern provinces, gives Patagonia something it long lacked: a professional news centre of its own in the far south.

Audience leadership in the south

The outlet's audience position is documented by external measurement rather than self-description alone. SembraMedia, the regional organisation that studies and supports independent digital media in Spanish, together with Comscore audience data, credits ADNSUR with audience leadership in Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. For an independent founded in 2012, leading the digital audience of three provinces against legacy media groups is a substantial achievement, and it underpins the outlet's role in the national independent-media ecosystem: when Argentine and international organisations look for a reference digital outlet in Patagonia, ADNSUR is the name the data supports.

That leadership reflects the fit between the outlet and its territory. Patagonia's dispersed population is highly connected out of necessity; distances make digital distribution natural, and a newsroom that publishes continuously on the subjects the south lives by — oil, weather, roads, provincial politics and the cost of living in remote cities — can aggregate an audience across provincial borders that no single-province legacy title can match.

Expansion into streaming: SETA TV

In 2023 ADNSUR launched SETA TV, a streaming television channel. The launch extended the outlet from text and web publishing into live and on-demand video, following the path of Argentina's most developed digital natives, for which streaming has become the natural second medium: cheaper to distribute than broadcast television, native to the phones and connected televisions the audience already owns, and well suited to a region where a single signal must cross enormous distances. For ADNSUR, SETA TV added faces, voices and live coverage to a brand built on the written web, and gave its advertisers and its audience a Patagonian streaming service to set alongside the national platforms.

Trust certification and the Chequeado network

ADNSUR's institutional recognition in the mid-2020s marks it out among Argentine regional media. In 2024 it obtained certification under the Journalism Trust Initiative, the international standard developed by Reporters Without Borders that certifies a news organisation's compliance with criteria of transparency, professional identity, editorial independence and accountability. Certification requires an outlet to document its ownership, its funding, its editorial processes and its corrections practices and to submit them to external audit; for a regional independent, obtaining it signals a level of institutional formalisation well beyond the norm.

In January 2025 the outlet became a member of Chequeado's Federal Network of innovative journalism, launched by Argentina's pioneering fact-checking organisation with regional digital partners across the country. The network, whose founding members also included Todo Jujuy in the north-west and Corrientes al Día in the north-east and which reaches millions of readers a month, connects provincial digital natives to shared fact-checking, training and collaborative journalism. ADNSUR's membership places it as the network's Patagonian pillar: the southern partner through which verified, fact-checked journalism reaches the far south, and through which southern stories enter national collaborative coverage.

Independent media in Patagonia

ADNSUR belongs to the ecosystem mapped and supported by SembraMedia: independent, digital-native, Spanish-language media built by entrepreneurial journalists outside the legacy groups. That ecosystem's Argentine members share a set of challenges — the dominance of official advertising in provincial markets, the bargaining power of the global platforms that distribute their content, and the difficulty of building reader revenue in low-income regions — and a set of strategies: audience data, diversified income, institutional transparency and collaboration networks. ADNSUR's trajectory shows those strategies working in one of the hardest territories in the country: audience leadership measured by Comscore, a streaming channel launched from its own resources, an international trust certification and membership of the national fact-checking network, all from a base in Comodoro Rivadavia.

The outlet also demonstrates the democratic importance of that ecosystem in the Argentine south. Patagonia's public life — its oil unions and companies, its provincial governments, its municipal politics, its environmental conflicts over mining, water and the sea — requires professional scrutiny close to the ground. Legacy media provide part of that scrutiny; ADNSUR's independent newsroom, founded by a local journalist and answerable to a southern audience, provides another, distinct part of it.

The founder and the newsroom

The outlet's founder, Ana Tronfi, is documented in its directory records as the journalist who created ADNSUR in 2012 and built it into the south's leading independent digital brand. In Argentina's independent media sector, founder-led outlets are the norm, and the founder's professional reputation is a core asset: it attracts the newsroom's journalists, anchors its credibility with sources and audiences, and carries the institution through the funding and platform changes that have marked digital publishing since 2012. ADNSUR's growth — from a Comodoro Rivadavia start-up to a three-province audience leader with a television channel — is inseparable from that founder-led continuity.

Significance

ADNSUR's significance can be stated simply: it is the outstanding example of independent digital-native journalism in Argentine Patagonia. Founded in 2012 in the oil city of Comodoro Rivadavia, it achieved documented audience leadership across Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego, expanded into streaming television with SETA TV in 2023, earned Journalism Trust Initiative certification in 2024 and joined Chequeado's Federal Network in 2025. Each of those steps is documented by the organisations that measure and support Latin American independent media. Together they describe an outlet that did not merely survive in a remote and difficult market, but became the reference point for how professional, independent, digital journalism is done in the Argentine south.