About Ciudad Magazine

Ciudad Magazine

Ciudad Magazine is an Argentine pay television channel devoted to entertainment, show business and celebrity news, owned by Grupo Clarín and operated by its audiovisual company Artear from Buenos Aires. It can be accessed throughout the country via subscription television, and it is the television companion of Ciudad.com.ar, described in industry accounts as Argentina's most visited show business website. The channel began on 9 January 1995 under the name Magazine, a name it carried until 1998, and was later rebranded Ciudad Magazine, uniting the channel with the Ciudad entertainment brand.

Within Artear's portfolio, Ciudad Magazine sits alongside the free-to-air network El Trece, the news channel TN, the classic programming channel Volver and other pay signals, as the group's specialist in entertainment and gossip journalism, the genre known in Argentina as chimentos. Its programmes are mostly outdoor and magazine shows about the world of celebrity, supplemented by inexpensive syndicated programming including telenovelas, series, films and older cartoons.

Overview

Ciudad Magazine is a Spanish-language variety channel broadcasting in 1080i high definition. Its owner is Grupo Clarín, its parent company is Artear, and its website is ciudad.com.ar. Artear's own listings classify the channel as a variety service with coverage across Argentina and the Americas. The channel's editorial territory is the entertainment industry: television celebrity, theatre, music, reality shows and the personal lives of public figures, covered in the fast, informal style of Argentine entertainment journalism.

The pairing of channel and website is central to the brand. Ciudad.com.ar built a large online audience for entertainment news, at one point described by Artear's digital executives as Argentina's most visited showbiz site, and the channel gives that digital brand a television presence, while the website gives the channel's programmes a second life as clips and stories. The two share a name, a newsroom culture and an audience.

History

The channel was launched on 9 January 1995 with the name Magazine, and it kept that name until 1998, according to reference listings. In its Magazine years it was one of the Argentine cable channels that emerged in the 1990s expansion of pay television, when Artear and other groups built portfolios of genre channels around their broadcast flagships. The channel was subsequently rebranded Ciudad Magazine, aligning it with the Ciudad entertainment website, a change that reflected the growing importance of the digital brand within the group.

Cable histories sometimes date the channel's Magazine origins differently in secondary listings, but the reference record used for this profile gives a launch of 9 January 1995 and the former name Magazine for the period 1995 to 1998. What is not in dispute is the channel's continuity: an entertainment and celebrity service operated by Artear in Buenos Aires from the mid-1990s to the present, under two names, serving the same genre throughout.

Ownership: Artear and Grupo Clarín

Ciudad Magazine is owned and operated by Grupo Clarín through Artear, the group's television company, whose assets include El Trece, TN, El Trece Satelital and El Trece Internacional, Volver, Quiero música en mi idioma, Canal (á), Metro and other signals. Artear's pay television portfolio is organised by genre: news on TN, archives on Volver, music on Quiero, culture on Canal (á), agriculture on Canal Rural, motoring on El Garage TV, and entertainment and celebrity on Ciudad Magazine. The channel is the entertainment specialist of that portfolio.

Grupo Clarín is Argentina's largest media conglomerate, built around the Clarín newspaper and extending across television, radio, cable and digital media. For a small genre channel, membership of that group brings carriage, cross-promotion on El Trece and TN, and access to the group's entertainment production, including the celebrities and programmes generated by El Trece's own fiction and reality output, which supply a large part of the Argentine show business agenda that Ciudad Magazine covers.

Programming

Reference listings describe the channel's production as several programmes, mostly outdoor and gossip shows, together with inexpensive syndicated programming, mainly old cartoons, telenovelas, series and movies. Its exclusive productions listed in reference sources include Informadísimos, a morning entertainment news programme whose title plays on being extremely well informed; Chimentero 3.0, a gossip programme whose name updates the traditional chimentero, the show business gossipmonger, for the social media age; and BDV, the long-running entertainment magazine programme. Independent productions carried by the channel have included El mundo de la CONMEBOL, Donna Moda, a fashion programme, and the programme Yes.

The syndicated side of the schedule has included telenovelas from Colombia and Mexico, among them La quiero a morir, Pasión de gavilanes, Lo que la vida me robó, Rosalinda and La rosa de Guadalupe, titles that fill daytime and late-night hours with proven regional fiction. The mixture is typical of a mid-tier cable channel: original entertainment journalism in the key daytime hours, when celebrity news is fresh, and acquired fiction around it.

The channel also serves as an extension of El Trece's entertainment universe, carrying programmes and content connected with the network's shows. Argentine entertainment television generates an intense secondary coverage industry, in which the events of reality and fiction programmes are debated daily on magazine shows; Ciudad Magazine is Artear's dedicated home for that coverage, keeping viewers of El Trece's entertainment output inside the group's own channels.

The Ciudad digital brand

Ciudad.com.ar is one of Artear's flagship digital properties. In an account of Artear's multiplatform strategy published by WAN-IFRA, the group's digital leadership described work on Ciudad.com alongside TN's digital network and ElTreceTV.com.ar as central projects, and called Ciudad Argentina's most visited showbiz site. The site publishes celebrity news, television coverage, photo galleries and video at the speed of social media, and it employs dedicated digital journalists and content writers, roles that trade directories record within Artear's Ciudad Magazine operation.

The rebranding of the channel from Magazine to Ciudad Magazine can be read as an acknowledgement of where the brand's centre of gravity had moved: the website's name, energy and audience were stronger than the channel's original generic title, so the channel took the website's name. It is an early Argentine example of a pattern now common in television, in which a digital brand renames a linear channel rather than the other way round.

Distribution and reach

Ciudad Magazine is available throughout Argentina via subscription television, and Artear lists its coverage as extending to the Americas, reflecting satellite distribution of the group's pay signals to other Spanish-speaking markets. It broadcasts in high definition, 1080i, in line with the technical standard of Artear's other channels. As a pay channel without free-to-air distribution, its audience is the cable and satellite audience, within which entertainment and celebrity programming has a loyal daytime and evening following.

The channel's reach is amplified by the website and by social platforms, where its programmes' segments circulate as clips. For celebrity journalism, whose natural unit is the short story or the striking image, that digital circulation may matter more than the linear audience, and the Ciudad brand is structured to exploit it.

Place in Argentine entertainment media

Argentina has a long and vigorous tradition of entertainment journalism, from the magazine press of the twentieth century to the television gossip programmes that became a genre of their own. Ciudad Magazine is Grupo Clarín's institutional home for that tradition on cable, complementing the entertainment coverage of El Trece and competing with the show business segments of rival channels and with digital-native celebrity outlets. Its longevity, three decades from its 1995 launch as Magazine, makes it one of the survivors of the 1990s cable expansion, most of whose genre channels have been closed, sold or renamed beyond recognition.

The channel also illustrates the economics of the modern cable portfolio: original production concentrated in a few recognisable magazine programmes, a schedule filled with acquired fiction, a brand shared with a major website, and value to the group that exceeds the channel's own ratings, because it keeps an entire genre, and its audience and advertisers, within the group's ecosystem.

Significance

Ciudad Magazine's significance lies in the combination it represents: a 1990s cable channel, a leading entertainment website and the celebrity machinery of Argentina's biggest media group, joined under one name. Launched as Magazine on 9 January 1995, renamed for the digital brand that outgrew it, and still operated by Artear from Buenos Aires, the channel is where Argentine show business talks about itself on television, and where the group's entertainment journalism, from Informadísimos to BDV, finds its dedicated home.