Chile has 16 regions. In the newspaper market, among the 63 periodicals identified for this report, 34 belong to the regional newspaper network of El Mercurio SAP; of these, 21 are directly owned by it and for the rest, it acts as an advertising agent. If we consider only the newspapers owned by El Mercurio SAP, through its local companies, it holds 33 per cent of the regional print market – it is the only one to achieve this level of concentration. A network of online news outlets called Soy Chile, one per region, complements its print publications. Copesa, the only other big player in the national newspaper industry, possesses one newspaper outside of Santiago, El Diario de Concepción.
For television, the public channel TVN has a network of nine regional offices: Antofagasta, Atacama, Coquimbo, Valparaíso, O’Higgins, Maule, Bío-Bío, Araucanía, and Austral. These units provide information to the central station in the capital and broadcast their own news programmes. This means that it is the only transversal actor present in several regions of Chile with local content.
The media holdings with higher impacts on the market, such as Bethia and Luksic Groups, have put their efforts in products with a national vocation, leaving space for entrepreneurial projects in different regions, whether from individual efforts or small groups whose focus is to develop content about what happens outside Santiago. The profiles are diverse. There are advertising firms that also own radio channels, start-ups like Mi Voz – a network of citizen journalism outlets focused on each region – and bigger companies like BioBio Comunicaciones. The latter is very strong in the BioBio Region, with its newspaper, television, and radio channels. It has expanded its brand to Santiago and is steadily becoming one of the most trusted brands for news consumption at the national level, as shown in the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Reports (Fernández Medina & Núñez-Mussa, 2019, 2020). CNTV and Subtel allow the concession of regional and low-range stations, bringing considerable diversity to the media map with small projects.
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