About LN+

LN+

LN+ is the pay television news channel of La Nación, the Buenos Aires newspaper founded in 1870 and one of Argentina's two great national dailies. Launched in late 2016, the channel, whose name expands as La Nación+, carries the newspaper's journalism into television, broadcasting largely live from the newspaper's own offices in Buenos Aires and relying heavily on La Nación journalists as presenters and contributors. It was conceived from the start as a digital-first project: in the words used at its launch, not a television channel that would have an app, but a mass web service that would also have a television signal.

The channel joined an already crowded Argentine cable news market that included TN, C5N, Crónica TV, Canal 26 and América 24. Its distinctiveness lay in its parentage. Where most Argentine news channels belong to broadcast or cable groups, LN+ belongs to a newspaper group, S.A. La Nación, whose by-laws have historically required its owners to be descendants of the Mitre family, the family of the newspaper's founder, former president Bartolomé Mitre. LN+ is the audiovisual extension of that institution.

Overview

LN+ is a Spanish-language pay television channel devoted to news and current affairs, available in Argentina on major pay systems and through its own streaming platforms and applications. Its programming is also available on demand and simultaneously on the website of La Nación, which at the time of the channel's launch was counted among the ten most visited websites in the country. The channel broadcasts from the offices of the newspaper, and most of its programmes are aired live, a working method that ties the television operation directly to the daily rhythm of the newsroom.

The channel's target audience was described by its executives as young adults interested in good-quality content, an audience La Nación had already built on mobile devices. That positioning set LN+ apart from the older cable news channels, whose audiences skewed older and whose formats had been designed for television first and adapted to digital later, if at all.

Background and launch

The channel grew out of an audiovisual project that La Nación began in April 2015 with a series of interviews called Conversaciones. During 2016 the newspaper added a newscast, La Nación PM, and more than thirty other microformats. According to Carlos Guyot, the newspaper's secretary general of redaction, speaking to the World Editors Forum, those products performed so well that they led the company toward a full channel. Pay television reached around 85 percent of Argentine households at the time, he noted, so a pay channel would let the newspaper reach new and broader audiences.

The channel was officially presented on 3 October 2016. Guillermo Rivaben, then chief executive of La Nación, described the launch as an important step in the evolution of the company as a communication business, expanding the reach of its journalism and quality content. Reference sources differ slightly on the precise on-air date: the Media Ownership Monitor records the cable channel as launched in November 2016, and Argentine digital terrestrial listings give 7 November 2016 for La Nación+. The launch period is therefore best described as October to November 2016, with the public presentation in October and regular broadcasting established that November. At launch the channel was available on Cablevisión and DirecTV Latin America, the two major pay platforms of the Argentine market.

Ownership

LN+ is owned by the La Nación group through S.A. La Nación, the publisher of the newspaper. The Media Ownership Monitor's profile of La Nación records that, under the corporation's by-laws, the newspaper's owners must be descendants of the Mitre family, a governance arrangement that links the modern media group directly to its nineteenth-century founder. La Nación has historically kept a conservative editorial line, and the newspaper is one of the two dominant titles, with Clarín, in Argentina's national press market.

The newspaper's history includes partnerships that shaped the Argentine media map, including the 1990s venture CIMECO, founded with Clarín to buy newspapers in the interior of the country, in which La Nación sold its stake to Grupo Clarín in 2008. Against that background, LN+ represented a different kind of expansion: not buying existing outlets, but building a new one from the newspaper's own newsroom and brand.

The digital-first model

The most distinctive feature of LN+ is the philosophy stated at its launch. La Nación said the channel was born with a digital vision and would go the opposite way to other television channels: it would not be a pay TV channel that had an app, but a massive web service that had a TV signal. In practice, that meant programming designed from the outset for both linear broadcast and digital consumption, with content made available on demand through an over-the-top platform as well as on the television schedule.

Executives explained that much of the channel's content would be serial in form: documentaries, scientific and historical investigations, and lifestyle programmes, alongside live news. The whole audiovisual offer was to be available on the OTT platform, while the company retained a separate exclusive audiovisual capacity for its digital operation. The platform technology for the LN+ digital service was supplied by Lemonwhale, whose video platform powered the web and mobile applications and the iOS and Android TV apps, with a responsive, mobile-optimised experience.

This model reflected La Nación's wider transformation into a digital news company. The newspaper had built a leading mobile audience, cited at launch as 11 million monthly users according to ComScore, and in 2017 it launched a paywall for its digital edition, later reaching, together with Clarín, some 300,000 digital subscribers each for the first time during the pandemic period, according to the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report. LN+ sits inside that strategy as the group's video arm.

Programming

Programming on LN+ is hosted largely by La Nación journalists, transferring the newspaper's bylines to the screen. The schedule combines live news and current-affairs programmes with the interview and documentary formats developed in the Conversaciones and La Nación PM experiments. Because most programmes air live from the newspaper's offices, the channel has the character of a newsroom broadcast: the people analysing the news on screen are, in many cases, the same people reporting and writing it for the paper and the website.

The Reuters Institute's country report on Argentina noted that during the pandemic period La Nación revamped its cable channel, hiring anchors and journalists and investing in new studios. That investment indicates that, several years after launch, the group continued to develop LN+ as a substantive part of its news operation rather than a marginal experiment.

Distribution and reach

At launch LN+ was carried by Cablevisión and DirecTV in Argentina, the two systems that between them reached most pay television households. The channel is also listed on Argentina's digital terrestrial platform, on channel 25.3 in the Buenos Aires multiplex listings, extending its availability beyond subscription television. Its streaming service is accessible through web and mobile applications, and industry directories record the service as available in multiple countries, with its audience concentrated in Argentina and significant usage reported in other Spanish-speaking markets and the United States, reflecting the Argentine diaspora's interest in news from home.

Distribution through La Nación's own website is central to the model. Because the newspaper's site is among Argentina's most visited, embedding the channel's live signal and on-demand programmes there gives LN+ a shop window that a stand-alone cable channel could not buy. The relationship runs both ways: the channel gives the website a live video offer that keeps users on the page during breaking news.

Place in the Argentine news market

When LN+ launched, Argentina already had five national cable news signals; the Reuters Institute later counted eight news networks in a country of 45 million people once LN+, Net TV's news output and IP were included. Ratings in this sector are modest in absolute terms: the Reuters Institute reported that the top-rated news channel, TN, had an average daily viewership of less than 200,000. LN+ competes in that environment not primarily on mass ratings but on the value of its audience to its parent group and to advertisers seeking the newspaper's demographic.

The channel also gave La Nación parity with its historic rival. Grupo Clarín had long combined the country's biggest newspaper with TN and El Trece; with LN+, La Nación could offer advertisers and audiences a newspaper, a leading website and a television channel of its own. In a media system defined by a few large groups, that completeness matters.

Audience and significance

The significance of LN+ is less about any single programme than about what it demonstrates in Argentine media economics: a legacy newspaper, founded in 1870, building a television channel in 2016 at a moment when many publishers worldwide were retreating from video experiments. La Nación's bet was that its journalism, its brand and its digital audience could sustain a channel designed for the phone as much as for the television set.

For viewers, LN+ added a news voice with a clear institutional identity, the voice of La Nación, to the cable dial. For the industry, it marked the point at which Argentina's two great newspapers both became audiovisual groups. The channel remains the television face of the newspaper, broadcasting live from its newsroom in Buenos Aires, and its history, from the Conversaciones interviews of 2015 to a full channel within eighteen months, is a compact case study in how print brands extended themselves in the streaming era.