About Diario Veloz

Diario Veloz

Diario Veloz is a digital-native news portal based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, published in Spanish at diarioveloz.com. It publishes general news, politics, sport and entertainment with continuous updating, and it operates online only, with no print edition. The portal was launched at the end of August 2009 by the veteran journalist Samuel Gelblung, known throughout Argentine media as Chiche Gelblung, as a personal digital venture in the style of his earlier online successes. It was a founding member of the Asociacion de Periodismo Digital, the association of digital journalism outlets formed by Argentina's leading native digital media, in which the Gelblung family was represented on the founding board. More than a decade and a half after its launch, Diario Veloz remains part of the first generation of Argentine digital-native generalist portals still publishing daily.

Samuel Gelblung and the road to Diario Veloz

Diario Veloz cannot be understood without its founder, one of the most durable figures in Argentine journalism. Samuel Gelblung's career, as summarised in his reference biography, spans the country's media history: he was chief editor of the magazine Gente from 1976 to 1978, in charge of the magazine La Semana during the 1980s, and a columnist on Ambito Financiero and La Nacion, where he became a director at the end of the 1980s. He had worked as a war correspondent as early as 1967, covering the Six-Day War under a pseudonym. In television and radio he became a household name as Chiche, a presenter whose confrontational, fast-moving style made him a fixture of Argentine current-affairs broadcasting.

Gelblung was also one of the first Argentine journalists of his generation to treat the internet as a primary medium. In October 2006 he founded the digital newspaper Minuto Uno, which grew into one of the country's most-visited news sites. In mid-2009 he left its direction and moved quickly through new digital experiments: a new portal, Edicion10, built to broadcast the South Africa World Cup live, which within a few months surpassed 50,000 daily visits; and then, at the end of August 2009, a new web venture in his own journalistic style, launched to compete for the first places of the Argentine online market - DiarioVeloz.com.

Founding and concept

The name states the concept: Diario Veloz, the fast newspaper. Gelblung launched the portal to compete at the top of the Argentine digital market on the strength of speed, volume and a recognisable editorial personality - the same formula he had already proved with Minuto Uno. The portal was a pure digital native: no printed paper, no broadcast parent, no legacy brand, only a newsroom publishing continuously to a web audience. Its founding moment, the northern spring of the Argentine digital boom, placed it in the cohort of portals - Minuto Uno, Urgente24, La Politica Online, 0223 and others - that demonstrated that online-only operations could set the national news agenda.

The portal's public self-description, preserved in directory listings, is a portal of news and current affairs spanning news, sport, television, radio, internet, show business, video and entertainment - the full popular mix of the Argentine generalist portal, updated minute by minute.

The Asociacion de Periodismo Digital

Diario Veloz's standing among its peers is documented in the founding of the Asociacion de Periodismo Digital, the organisation through which Argentina's digital-native outlets organised themselves as an industry. The association's founding declaration argued that digital platforms were a fundamental contribution to the consolidation of democracy, that their chaotic expansion had left them at a disadvantage beside traditional media protected by legislation, and that they had to organise to guarantee the consolidation of their journalistic companies in a demanding market. Diario Veloz was a founding member, alongside Minuto Uno, Urgente24, La Politica Online and 0223, among others, and Federico Gelblung sat on the founding board as syndico - the association's oversight officer - while the presidency went to La Politica Online's Ignacio Fidanza. Membership in that founding group is the clearest institutional marker of Diario Veloz's place in the first rank of Argentina's digital natives.

What it publishes

Diario Veloz publishes the generalist agenda of Argentine popular digital journalism. Politics comes first in volume and prominence: the national government, Congress, the courts, elections, the provinces and the perpetual contests of Peronism and its rivals. Sport follows, with Argentine football at its centre, and entertainment - television, celebrity news and show business - supplies a third large strand, suited to a founder whose broadcast career was built across current affairs and popular culture alike. Police news, society, the economy and international stories complete the mix, and the whole is published with continuous updating, so that the homepage functions as a running wire of the Argentine day rather than as a fixed edition.

The portal's stories are regularly taken up as sources by other Argentine media and by reference works: its reporting on events such as the 2013 La Plata floods appears in the citation record of encyclopaedic accounts of those events, a small but concrete sign of the portal's integration into the national news circuit, in which digital natives both break stories and supply the raw chronicle that other outlets build on.

Editorial character

The portal carries its founder's journalistic signature: direct, rapid, personality-led and oriented to the exclusive and the confrontation. Gelblung's style - honed in magazines, perfected on television talk formats and applied earlier to Minuto Uno - treats news as a contest of revelations, in which the portal that publishes first and frames boldest wins the audience. Diario Veloz was built explicitly to compete for the first places in the market, and its tone reflects that ambition rather than any aspiration to institutional detachment. Like its founder, who publicly backed the 2009 Audiovisual Communication Services Law that replaced the dictatorship-era broadcasting law, the portal operates inside, not above, Argentina's political arguments about media.

Change in 2019: InfoVeloz

In 2019 the Gelblung digital operation entered a new phase. On 1 August 2019, according to the founder's reference biography, Gelblung launched a new news portal, InfoVeloz, to replace the previous one, after debts accumulated with the company responsible for the site's maintenance and lawsuits with former employees of the newspaper. The episode illustrates the financial fragility beneath even successful Argentine digital natives: traffic leadership did not immunise a founder-owned portal against the costs of technology contracts and labour litigation. The Diario Veloz name and site nonetheless continued to figure in listings of Argentine digital portals, and the outlet's founding role in the digital association remained part of the sector's institutional history.

Place in Argentine digital media

Diario Veloz's significance is threefold. It demonstrated, after Minuto Uno, that its founder's formula for digital news was repeatable - that a recognisable journalistic personality could build a top-tier portal from nothing, twice. It belonged, institutionally, to the founding group of the Asociacion de Periodismo Digital, through which the digital natives claimed a place at the table of Argentine media policy. And it helped normalise the popular generalist portal - politics, football, show business and police news at high speed - as a permanent feature of the Argentine information landscape, one that legacy newspapers were eventually obliged to imitate on their own sites.

Continuing publication

Diario Veloz continues to be listed among Argentina's digital news portals, publishing general news, politics, sport and entertainment online with continuous updating and no print edition. Founded in 2009 by one of the country's most recognisable journalists as a deliberate bid for the top of a new market, it remains a document of the moment when Argentine journalism's centre of gravity began to move, irreversibly, online.