About elDiarioAR

elDiarioAR

elDiarioAR is a digital-native newspaper based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, published online at eldiarioar.com. Launched in December 2020, it was created as the first Latin American sister paper of elDiario.es, the Spanish digital newspaper, and as that title's first international edition. It is not a print newspaper with a website attached, and it has never depended on a print circulation business. From its first day it was conceived as an Argentine newspaper for Argentine readers, written and led by Argentine journalists in Buenos Aires, while sharing the spirit, model and ideals of its Spanish partner.

The publication covers politics, economy, culture and human rights, with a wider editorial interest in the social questions that shape everyday life in Argentina. Its stated focus includes gender, the environment, climate change, poverty, inequality, human rights and social issues, and the relationship between those who hold power and the possibility of social change. It is funded principally through a reader-membership model rather than a conventional paywall, a choice that places it, in the reporting of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, alongside Cenital as one of Argentina's membership-funded digital natives.

Origins and Launch

elDiarioAR was announced at the end of October 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ignacio Escolar, the founder and director of elDiario.es, announced on 31 October 2020 that a new paper would be launched in December under the name elDiarioAR, describing it as the Spanish title's first edition in Latin America. Much of the new team joined the Buenos Aires newsroom at the beginning of November 2020, several weeks before publication began, so that the paper could be built, staffed and prepared before it appeared publicly in December.

The timing mattered. The launch took place at the onset of the pandemic in a year when high news consumption, economic crisis and falling advertising revenue were forcing media organisations across Argentina to diversify their income and to experiment with membership and subscription systems. Contemporary reporting on the launch described elDiarioAR as possibly the most ambitious editorial venture of recent years in Argentina, precisely because it attempted to transplant a proven reader-funded model into a different country rather than simply opening a foreign bureau.

The Spanish parent paper provided the template. elDiario.es had been launched in Spain in September 2012, eight years before the Argentine announcement, and had built its reputation on financial transparency, reader-community participation and ownership concentrated in the hands of working journalists. elDiarioAR was presented as an application of those same principles to Argentine conditions, Argentine subjects and an Argentine newsroom.

A Sister Paper, Not a Bureau

A central point made repeatedly at the launch was that elDiarioAR is a new newspaper, not a correspondent's office or a delegation of a Spanish title. Escolar stressed that the entire staff is Argentine and that the project was driven, formed and led by Argentine journalists who shared with the Spanish team a set of principles and a way of understanding the profession. With Spanish support, those journalists were to build a medium that was Argentine and for Argentines.

That distinction shaped the paper's identity. A bureau exists to report a country for readers elsewhere. A sister paper exists to report a country for its own readers, while benefiting from a close relationship with a related title abroad. In elDiarioAR's case the relationship also worked in the other direction: the new Buenos Aires paper was expected to strengthen the international reporting of elDiario.es itself, giving the Spanish title a permanent, staffed presence in Latin America rather than reliance on occasional contributors.

The founders also left open the possibility that Argentina would not be the last step. At the launch, Escolar anticipated an ambition to take the elDiario.es network to other Latin American countries if the Argentine experiment succeeded. elDiarioAR was therefore both a national newspaper in its own right and a test of whether a membership-funded, journalist-owned model born in Spain could be reproduced elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world.

Ownership and Journalists as Shareholders

Ownership is one of the defining features of the elDiario model, and elDiarioAR adopted it directly. At the launch, Escolar explained that the promoters and shareholders of the Argentine project were only elDiario.es and the journalists of elDiarioAR themselves. There were no large corporate groups, financial investors or hidden backers presented as owners of the new paper. As in Spain eight years earlier, the team leading the Argentine project invested with its work, on the argument that the journalists' work was the most valuable asset with which to found such a medium.

The Spanish model that inspired this structure had been described in the same terms: a publishing company whose shareholding was composed primarily of newsroom professionals, a formula designed from the outset to avoid dependence on large corporate or financial groups. In the announcement of the Argentine launch, the new paper's own social media described its partner and brother title as a vanguard medium where journalists are also shareholders and where tens of thousands of reader-members contributed to its sustainability.

For readers, the practical meaning of this ownership structure is transparency about who controls the newspaper. elDiarioAR has presented its independence as resting on two connected foundations: journalists who have a direct stake in the company they work for, and readers whose voluntary membership payments, rather than a single proprietor or advertiser, provide the economic base. Later appeals for support have repeated the same point, stating that the paper does not depend on companies, political parties or hidden financiers, but on the direct support of its readers.

Leadership and Newsroom

The original idea for an Argentine edition was proposed to Escolar by the Argentine journalist Guillermo Culell, who became the paper's general director. Culell brought long experience in digital media in Argentina and the region, having led the launch of Clarín's website and held senior digital roles with El Comercio in Lima, Peru, and with El Mercurio's regional media in Chile, before returning to Argentina to lead Vía País, a network of news sites with nodes in more than sixty Argentine cities.

Around him, the founding leadership reflected a similar background in Argentina's established press. Marcelo Franco, who had worked as an editor on Clarín's website, accompanied Culell in general management. Martín Sivak, a journalist, writer and university professor, served as journalistic director, while Silvina Heguy, whose previous work included Clarín, Anfibia and Crónica, served as director of strategy. In February 2024, when the Media Development Investment Fund announced its investment in the company, Delfina Torres Cabreros was quoted in her capacity as elDiarioAR's editorial director.

The first public staff list, published at the beginning of November 2020, named nineteen journalists. Contemporary reporting described the wider newsroom as experienced, bringing together journalists who had previously worked at outlets including Perfil, Clarín, La Nación, Página/12, Cenital and Bloomberg. Those journalists had built their reputations in sections covering economy, politics, international news, society, culture and sport, giving the start-up, from its first weeks, a newsroom drawn from across Argentina's existing media landscape rather than a team assembled only from newcomers.

Editorial Focus and Coverage

elDiarioAR presents itself as a team of journalists whose purpose is to tell and analyse the country and the era. In its inaugural statements in November 2020, the paper said that in times of uncertainty and polarisation it would try to be a rigorous and original reference. That ambition has framed coverage that combines daily political and economic reporting with longer analytical and cultural work.

Politics and the economy form the core of the daily agenda, as they do for most Argentine national news organisations, in a country where government decisions, inflation, public spending and relations between political forces affect readers directly and immediately. Around that core, the paper gives sustained attention to culture and to society, and to subjects that its Spanish sister title had also treated as central rather than secondary. The Media Development Investment Fund, in announcing its investment in February 2024, summarised the editorial focus as a new agenda for social change, covering gender, environment, climate change, poverty, inequality, human rights and social issues, and examining the relationship between those in power and social change.

This combination distinguishes elDiarioAR from a purely breaking-news operation. Its reporting is intended to connect the exercise of power in Buenos Aires and the provinces with the consequences felt in workplaces, households and public services. Human rights coverage, in particular, connects the paper to a long Argentine tradition in which journalism about state power, memory, justice and civil liberties carries a significance that goes beyond the news cycle of a single day.

The Membership Model, Not a Paywall

The best-known feature of elDiarioAR is how it asks readers to pay. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report coverage of Argentina has repeatedly contrasted two approaches among the country's online outlets. Legacy print media such as Perfil and El Cronista maintained paywalls, and the large historic titles Clarín and La Nación built digital subscription businesses behind paywalls. Digital natives such as Cenital and elDiarioAR, by contrast, relied on a membership system.

Under a membership model, journalism remains openly accessible and readers are invited to contribute because they value the work and want it to continue, rather than because a meter or paywall blocks them from reading. The Reuters Institute noted that such membership packages in Argentina combined access to online news with daily or weekly newsletters. For elDiarioAR, the model was inherited directly from elDiario.es, which had adopted an open-content approach from its first week in 2012, introducing members who contributed financially to guarantee the paper's independence.

By the time of the Argentine launch, that Spanish model had reached an important milestone: in 2020, during the coronavirus crisis, membership income at elDiario.es had overtaken advertising income. Escolar was explicit, however, that the aim in Argentina was not simply to extract profit. The stated intention was for elDiarioAR to become profitable and sustainable, but with economic solvency treated as a means rather than an end. He also noted that in a digital newspaper the main cost is the journalists themselves, with technology in second place, and that in the Argentine case the technology cost was already covered because the new paper could use the same technical tools and design developed for elDiario.es.

Place in Argentina's Media Landscape

elDiarioAR entered a media system that the Reuters Institute describes as characterised by concentrated private ownership, comparatively weak public broadcasters and a high degree of political polarisation reflected in the media. Print circulation in Argentina has continued to fall year after year, trust in news is low by international comparison, and interest in news has declined from the levels recorded in the previous decade. In that environment, the two most-used online news sources in the Reuters Institute's early-2023 survey were Infobae and the website and apps of the cable news channel TN, neither of which operated a paywall or membership system at that time.

Against that background, elDiarioAR occupies a specific niche rather than competing on the same terms as the largest traffic-driven sites. It is a comparatively small, independent, reader-funded title whose claim on attention rests on rigour, originality and a distinctive social agenda. Its willingness to operate without a hard paywall also reflects the reality of the Argentine market, where the Reuters Institute found that only a small minority of respondents had paid for online news at all in the previous year. A voluntary membership asks that minority to support journalism as a public good that remains available to everyone else.

The paper's existence also widened the geography of the elDiario project. Before December 2020, elDiario.es was a Spanish newspaper with regional editions inside Spain. After that date it had, for the first time, a full sister newsroom outside Spain, in Buenos Aires, staffed entirely by local journalists and covering a different country's politics, economy and culture for that country's own readers.

Sustainability, Investment and Pressure

Operating a membership-funded newspaper in Argentina means operating through recurring economic instability. When the Media Development Investment Fund announced its investment in elDiarioAR on 2 February 2024, it placed that decision explicitly in the context of a deepening economic and institutional crisis, spiralling inflation and a looming recession, conditions that make it difficult for independent media to thrive. The investment was intended to help the company expand its audience, develop its membership strategy and explore and diversify its revenue streams.

elDiarioAR's editorial director at the time, Delfina Torres Cabreros, said the support gave the paper certainty to focus on its journalistic work in a difficult economic context, and stressed that the contribution in no way compromised its editorial approach. The Fund's Latin America programme director, Ana Soffietto, described elDiarioAR as an important independent media organisation whose journalism contributes to pluralistic public debate in Argentina. The episode illustrated the paper's continuing balancing act: accepting institutional support to survive economically while publicly insisting that journalistic criteria, not funders, govern editorial decisions.

Later reporting on an urgent appeal by the paper's general director described the same fragility from the inside: a membership community of around fifteen hundred members, accounts under severe strain, and readers themselves affected by inflation and falling real incomes, which made it harder for many supporters to keep contributing. Whether or not any single appeal defines the paper's position, the pattern is consistent with its model. A newspaper paid for voluntarily by readers in a country in economic crisis is directly exposed to that crisis, in a way that a title owned by a large diversified group is not.

Significance and Outlook

elDiarioAR matters for three connected reasons. First, it demonstrated that the elDiario.es experiment in journalist ownership and reader membership was not confined to Spain, but could be offered, with local leadership and a local newsroom, to readers in Latin America. Second, it added a distinct voice to Argentine digital journalism at a moment of polarisation, falling print circulation and declining trust, a voice that placed gender, inequality, the environment and human rights at the centre of its agenda rather than at its margins. Third, it provided researchers with a clear Argentine example of an alternative to the paywall, which is why the Reuters Institute has cited it, year after year, alongside Cenital when describing how Argentina's digital natives fund their journalism.

Its future depends on the same factors that have shaped its first years: whether enough Argentine readers continue to regard voluntary payment for open journalism as worthwhile, whether membership and diversified revenue can withstand inflation and recession, and whether a small independent newsroom can maintain rigorous, original reporting under political and economic pressure. Those questions remain open. What is established is the paper's founding proposition, unchanged since December 2020: that a newspaper owned by its journalists and sustained by its readers can report Argentina independently, without a paywall and without dependence on a large corporate proprietor.