About Buenos Aires Times

Buenos Aires Times

The Buenos Aires Times, published at batimes.com.ar, is the English-language newspaper of Editorial Perfil S.A. in Buenos Aires. It is published online and in print each Saturday together with the Perfil newspaper, and it covers Argentine politics, economy, society and culture for an international English-speaking readership. It is the successor title to the historic Buenos Aires Herald, which closed in 2017 after 140 years as Latin America's only English-language daily. Where the Herald had been an independent institution with its own long history, the Times is a Perfil-era publication — a distinct newspaper, catalogued separately from the Herald, that took up the task of reporting Argentina in English for the world.

Successor to the Buenos Aires Herald

Any account of the Buenos Aires Times begins with the newspaper it succeeded. The Buenos Aires Herald was founded in 1876 by the Scotsman William Cathcart and became one of the most storied newspapers in South America: Argentina's fourth-oldest newspaper, the only English-language daily in Latin America, and a paper of international renown for its courage during the 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship, when under editor Robert Cox it reported on the disappeared at a time when most Argentine media were silent — reporting that forced Cox into exile and saved, as later accounts documented, human lives. Andrew Graham-Yooll later served as its chief editor.

The Herald's end came in stages: its last daily edition appeared on 26 October 2016, it moved to weekly publication shedding most of its staff, and its final edition was published on Friday 28 July 2017, closing after 140 years because it could no longer survive financially on falling circulation. An English-language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Times, was later published by Editorial Perfil, online and printed with Perfil on Saturdays. The succession is a matter of function rather than of corporate continuity: Perfil, a different publisher, created a new English-language title for the readership the Herald had served. The Herald itself returned in a separate daily online format on 24 March 2023 — a distinct revival that should not be confused with the Times, which continues as Perfil's English-language newspaper.

Editorial Perfil and the Saturday Print Edition

The Buenos Aires Times is produced by Editorial Perfil S.A., the Buenos Aires publishing house founded around the news magazine Noticias and the newspaper Perfil, whose slogan is Periodismo puro — pure journalism. Perfil is one of Argentina's significant independent publishers, with a portfolio spanning newspapers, magazines, radio and digital media, and a corporate history of friction with governments over official advertising, which it has long claimed is distributed discriminatorily against critical media.

Within that house, the Times has a defined form: an English-language newspaper published online continuously and in print on Saturdays, distributed together with the Saturday Perfil. The weekly print rhythm makes it a paper of review and analysis as much as of news — a considered English-language account of the Argentine week — while the website at batimes.com.ar carries the continuing daily flow. As of April 2021, its editor-in-chief was James Grainger, a fact recorded in reference sources on Perfil; contributors have included international journalists writing for the paper, among them the Canadian-American journalist and cultural critic Sam Forster, who wrote for it through 2022.

A Human Thread from the Herald

The most direct personal link between the two newspapers is Andrew Graham-Yooll, formerly chief editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, who became Perfil's ombudsman. The appointment gave the new English-language venture a living connection to the Herald's standards and memory, through one of the figures most associated with its later history. It also signalled Perfil's intention that its English-language publishing stand in a serious journalistic tradition rather than serve as a translation service for its Spanish-language content.

Beyond that thread, the two papers differ in kind. The Herald was a daily community institution for Buenos Aires's English-speaking world, with the sections, supplements and social texture of a full newspaper. The Times is a weekly-in-print, digital-first title from a Spanish-language publishing group, addressed as much to readers abroad as to residents — diplomats, executives, correspondents, scholars and the large international public that follows Argentine politics and football, economics and culture, and needs them in English from an Argentine newsroom.

Coverage: Argentina in English

The Times covers Argentine politics, economy, society and culture for an international English-speaking readership. In practice that means the national government's programme and conflicts, Congress and the courts, inflation, debt and the markets, energy and agriculture, and the social story of a country whose crises and recoveries are watched worldwide — together with the culture, sport and human stories that explain Argentina to readers who may never have visited. Its value lies in selection as much as in reporting: for a foreign reader, a Buenos Aires newsroom's judgement about which Argentine stories matter, explained with the context an outsider needs, is the product.

That role has practical weight. International coverage of Argentina often arrives through wire copy and visiting correspondents; a standing English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires supplies continuity — the same institution following a minister, a reform or a court case across months — and a check on how Argentina is being described abroad. For English-speaking residents, from the diplomatic and business communities to teachers and retirees, it is also a local paper: the week's Argentine news in their own language, in print on Saturday and online daily.

The English-Language Tradition in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires has had English-language journalism since the nineteenth century, serving first the large British and anglophone communities built by trade, railways and finance, and later the wider international city. The Herald embodied that tradition at its highest level, and its closure in 2017 was reported internationally as the end of an era — the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas recorded the final daily edition of a 140-year-old paper as a landmark loss. The Buenos Aires Times is the continuation of that tradition under new economic terms: not a daily with a large dedicated staff, but a Perfil-produced weekly and website that keeps an English-language Argentine newsroom in existence.

The distinction between continuation and identity is maintained in reference cataloguing, and this profile maintains it too: the Times is listed as a separate outlet from the Herald because it is a distinct publication of the Perfil era. Readers researching the Herald's history should not attribute its record to the Times, nor the Times's coverage to the Herald.

Digital Presence and Readership

The Times publishes online at batimes.com.ar, where its reporting reaches the global audience that is now the natural readership of English-language Argentine news: readers in North America, Europe and the anglophone world following Argentina, Latin America correspondents and researchers, and the Argentine diaspora's English-speaking generations. Its Saturday print edition, bundled with Perfil, serves the resident Buenos Aires readership in the traditional form.

No independently audited circulation or traffic figures are asserted in the sources behind this profile. The outlet's standing is documented by its publisher, its format and its role: it is Editorial Perfil's English-language newspaper, the recognised successor in function to the Herald for the international readership, and the standing English-language title of one of Argentina's major publishing houses.

Challenges

English-language publishing in a Spanish-speaking country faces a permanently narrow local market, and the Herald's fate showed that even prestige and 140 years of history could not sustain a daily on it. The Times's model — weekly print within a large Spanish-language group, costs shared with Perfil's wider operation, digital distribution to a global niche — is the industry's answer to that arithmetic. Its challenges are Perfil's as well: the economics of Argentine print, the distribution of official advertising that the group has long contested, and competition for the international reader's attention from global outlets that now cover Argentina directly in English.

There is also the standing challenge of translation in the deepest sense: rendering Argentine politics — its Peronist and anti-Peronist traditions, its federal tensions, its economic vocabulary — intelligible to readers without the cultural background, without flattening what is distinctive. A Buenos Aires-based English-language newsroom, staffed by journalists who live the story, is better placed for that work than any outside bureau, and it is the core justification for the title's existence.

How to Read the Buenos Aires Times

Read the Times at batimes.com.ar for continuing coverage, and in its Saturday print edition with Perfil for the week's considered account. It is most useful as an entry point and a companion: for readers new to Argentina, the clearest single Argentine source in English; for experienced observers, a Buenos Aires newsroom's selection and framing of its own country's news. Pair it with the Spanish-language press for depth on stories it treats briefly, and with the revived Herald's separate online publication where comparison between the two English-language titles is wanted — remembering that they are distinct outlets with distinct publishers.

Significance

The Buenos Aires Times is significant because it kept English-language newspaper journalism alive in Buenos Aires when the Herald's closure might have ended it. As Editorial Perfil's English-language newspaper — online daily and in print each Saturday with Perfil — it assumed the successor's role for an international readership: reporting Argentina's politics, economy, society and culture in English, from Argentina, with an editorial lineage that reaches back through Graham-Yooll's ombudsman role to the Herald tradition itself. It is a different kind of paper from its predecessor, built for a different media economy, but the function it performs — Argentina explained in English by journalists in Buenos Aires — is the same one that made its predecessor matter for 140 years.