About La Izquierda Diario

La Izquierda Diario

La Izquierda Diario is an online newspaper based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and published in Spanish at laizquierdadiario.com. It was launched in Argentina on 16 September 2014 by the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas, known in English as the Socialist Workers' Party and by its Spanish initials PTS, a Trotskyist political party. From the day of its launch it was conceived not as the website of a printed paper but as a digital newspaper in its own right, created so that the Argentine left would have, in the words later used by its promoters, its own voice on the national scene, competing with the large commercial media. Its editor is Fernando Rosso, and its headquarters are in Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, although its reporting and its network of correspondents extend across the country and, through its sister editions, across much of the world.

Origins and launch

The newspaper appeared in September 2014, at a moment when Argentina's media landscape was dominated by large multimedia groups and when the parties of the revolutionary left still relied mainly on printed party papers, pamphlets and radio programmes to reach a wider public. The PTS had published the printed newspaper La Verdad Obrera from 1992, and La Izquierda Diario effectively became its successor as the party's principal publication, a relationship recorded in reference listings of the party, which give La Izquierda Diario as the party newspaper from 2015. The decision to build a daily online newspaper, updated continuously rather than weekly or monthly, marked a deliberate change of scale: instead of speaking only to militants and sympathisers, the new title set out to intervene in the everyday news agenda with the speed of a commercial digital outlet.

Writing at the launch in September 2014, Fernando Rosso presented the project as a form of Leninist combat journalism for the internet age, arguing that a workers' newspaper had to dispute the interpretation of current events on the same terrain, and at the same pace, as the major news organisations. That founding ambition explains much of the outlet's later character: a newsroom that produces breaking news, interviews, analysis and opinion under an explicit political line, rather than a bulletin that simply records the activity of one party.

An international network from the start

What most distinguishes La Izquierda Diario from other Argentine party publications is that it was international from birth. It was launched together with the international current to which the PTS belongs, the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International, today also described by its promoters as the Permanent Revolution Current – Fourth International. By 2014 the PTS declared that it had an international network of Trotskyist rapporteurs in 15 countries, and the newspaper network declares that it publishes 15 local editions written in seven languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, English, Catalan and Italian. The Argentine edition is the hub of that network, and material moves between editions, so that a strike, an election or a feminist mobilisation in one country can be reported by local correspondents and then read, in translation, by audiences in the others.

Party leaders have underlined the singularity of that construction, describing La Izquierda Diario as the first digital newspaper of the left and noting that, years after its launch, it remained unique among the revolutionary left internationally in sustaining a daily, multi-country, multi-language news operation. For readers, the practical effect is that the Buenos Aires site combines Argentine news with an unusually direct window onto the activity of sister parties and movements abroad, written by participants rather than summarised from wire copy.

Editorial line

La Izquierda Diario publishes from an openly declared Trotskyist perspective. Its ideology is communism and Trotskyism, and within Argentine politics the PTS forms part of the Workers' Left Front, the electoral alliance that has won seats in the national Congress and in provincial legislatures. The newspaper does not present itself as neutral: its pages argue for the political independence of the working class from the major Argentine political traditions, including Peronism and the centre-right, and they interpret daily events through that lens. Its women's coverage reflects the party's Marxist-feminist position and its long association with the Pan y Rosas women's movement, giving the site a socialist-feminist voice on questions of gender violence, reproductive rights and women's work that is distinctive within Argentine digital media.

At the same time, the newspaper has been credited with gaining a readership well beyond committed Trotskyists among the wider Argentine left. That broader reach is a recurring theme in profiles of its editor and of the project itself: students, teachers, health workers, transport workers and activists in social movements read it for strike news, workplace reporting and movement coverage that the large commercial outlets cover briefly, late, or not at all.

What it covers

The core beats of La Izquierda Diario are politics, labour, the women's movement and culture, as summarised in reference descriptions of the outlet, but its daily output is wider. Political coverage follows Congress, the national government, the courts, elections and the internal life of the Argentine left, including debates inside the Workers' Left Front. Labour coverage is unusually detailed for a national outlet: disputes in factories, schools, hospitals, public transport and logistics are reported as national news, often with testimony from rank-and-file workers and delegates rather than only from union leaderships. Education and student politics, human rights, the environment, the economy and international politics all have regular space, as do film, literature, music and theatre criticism written from the same political standpoint.

The international sections draw on the network's own editions, so coverage of Latin America, Europe and the United States frequently carries the bylines of correspondents writing from those countries. That structure makes the newspaper function, in part, as a small international news agency of the Trotskyist movement, and it is one reason its Argentine homepage reads differently from those of its Buenos Aires competitors.

People and organisation

Fernando Rosso is listed as the newspaper's editor, and he is also one of its most visible public voices, hosting the radio programme El Circulo Rojo, broadcast on the commercial station Radio con Vos and listened to, according to party accounts, by thousands of listeners each week. The wider media ecosystem around the newspaper includes the theoretical journal Ideas de Izquierda, the youth ideological monthly Armas de la Critica, the Leon Trotsky study and publishing centre and the IPS publishing house, which together give the current an unusually complete cultural apparatus for a party of its size. In recent years the project has also developed LID+, a set of weekly political and cultural programmes published in video, extending the newspaper's written journalism into streaming formats.

These audience figures are the project's own, reported by its promoters rather than by an independent auditor, but they indicate the scale the newspaper claims a decade after its launch and the importance it now places on social platforms as distribution channels alongside its website.

Place in Argentine digital media

La Izquierda Diario occupies a niche that did not previously exist in Argentina: a daily, professionally updated, openly revolutionary newspaper operating at national scale. Earlier party papers were printed, periodic and aimed mainly at militants. This title inverted that model, adopting the forms of digital-native journalism - continuous updating, search and social distribution, video and audio spin-offs - while keeping an explicit party ownership and line that most digital natives avoid. Its launch in 2014 therefore forms part of the same decade-long transformation that produced Argentina's commercial and independent digital natives, even though its purpose, openly stated, is not market share but political intervention.

How it is read and followed

The newspaper is free to read online, and its Buenos Aires homepage mixes the day's Argentine news with opinion columns, interviews and the most-read stories from its international editions. Readers encounter it most often through social networks, where its feminist, labour and student coverage circulates among audiences who may never visit the homepage directly, and through search, where its reporting on specific workplace conflicts or local campaigns is frequently the most detailed account available. Its radio and video offshoots feed the same circuit, introducing broadcast audiences to the written newspaper and vice versa.

Continuing role

A decade after its founding, La Izquierda Diario remains active and remains the central publication of the PTS, whose previous paper, La Verdad Obrera, ended its run in 2015 as the digital title took over. In a media system often described through the rivalry of two large blocs, it persists as a third pole of a very different kind: small beside the multimedia groups, but organised internationally, updated daily, and read, by its own account, by hundreds of thousands of people each month in Argentina alone. For historians of Argentine media, it is the clearest example of a political party successfully rebuilding its press for the digital era without abandoning the older idea that a newspaper is also an organiser.