The two main newspaper companies in Chile, El Mercurio SAP and Copesa, are located in the capital, Santiago. Regarding nationally distributed newspapers, El Mercurio SAP prints the morning paper El Mercurio, an evening paper La Segunda, and the tabloid Las Últimas Noticias. Copesa is transitioning to a digital media company, so it reduced its print outlets in 2021. Their daily national newspaper La Tercera, is now printed only on weekends in two regions of the country. Their tabloid La Cuarta became a website.
El Mercurio SAP also owns a network of regional publications, including daily newspapers, periodicals, and magazines – the most extensive network in the national territory. Some of these publications belong to other owners, for whom El Mercurio SAP sells the advertising. Distributed by zones, each newspaper covers more than one city.
Building upon data collected by Orchard and colleagues (2017), I reviewed how many printed publications are still functioning, discarding those without an active online presence proving their existence; I also removed one published by a municipality. In total, I identified 63 regional newspapers in Chile, outside of the Metropolitan Region, including dailies and weeklies. Of this number, 34 belong to the network of regional newspapers of El Mercurio SAP and 21 of them are owned directly by the company (Medios Regionales, 2020; see also Indicator E2 – Media ownership concentration regional level).
The Metropolitan Region has the largest number of newspapers, including more niche and independent projects, for instance, specifically economic or political media. Therefore, it is the region that offers most access and media diversity.
Among the free newspapers is Publimetro, by Metro International, distributed in the metro stations in Santiago and ten other cities across the country, and HoyxHoy, born as a project from El Mercurio’s regional newspapers to exclusively cover the Metropolitan Region. Until 2020, Copesa also printed the newspaper La Hora, which was closed down due to the economic crisis that the media is currently undergoing.
The average number of televisions per home is 2.5, as of 2017 (CNTV, 2018a); but, it is in the regions with higher purchasing power that the most modern equipment can be found, for instance, smart-TVs (CNTV, 2018b). There are eight open access channels nationwide. The only public channel is TVN, with a large offering of VHF television signals and one signal for digital television. Meanwhile, private channels Canal 13 and Chilevisión (CHV) have geographically extensive coverage in both systems. In terms of total coverage, these are followed by Mega, Telecanal, and TV+. After the start of quarantine due to Covid-19, a new channel called TV Educa Chile was created to be aired on open access television, online, and through over 20 companies of paid television. It broadcast educational content for the whole country (Mineduc, 2020).
The public station TVN has a network of nine regional centres distributed across the country from north to south: Antofagasta, Atacama, Coquimbo, Valparaíso, O’Higgins, Maule, BíoBío, Araucanía, and Austral. Every day they produce a half-hour regional news programme, only shown in the respective region and privileged over national broadcasting. At the same time, they feed regional information to the central headquarters to be eventually distributed nationwide (TVN, 2020).
An example of the large coverage of open access television in Chile is its reach to Easter Island, where, despite logistical difficulties, three signals are received: TVN, CHV, and La Red, alongside the local channel, Mata o te Rapa Nui.
Digital Land Television had hoped to end analogue television by 2020. However, television channels requested the Telecommunications Undersecretary postpone it until 2024, since they are not yet ready for complete nationwide implementation that demands more sophisticated technology (Bertran, 2019a). Most channels already working with this technology across the country belong to the main open access stations (TVD, 2019), but between 2017 and 2018, local access concessions were given to educational, commercial, and community entities, of which some signals are still available (CNTV, 2020b). Therefore, the technology spans the country and is projected to be accessed by 80 per cent of Chileans by 2022 (Bertran, 2019b).
For each of the 16 zones dividing Chile, there are open access regional television channels. In addition, there are local and community television concessions that reach less than 25 per cent of regional population. Despite this, regional television has an increased viewership and greater approval from audiences when it shows content focused on the representation of local identities (CNTV, 2018b).
The Regional Association of Television Channels, comprising 21 stations, produces the television news programme Portavoz Noticias, which unites long and short news pieces sent by the different members of the network; these are broadcast by each station. The Regional Association of Television Channels also manages projects, such as workshops, to instruct their associated channels about content digitalisation and streaming-based transmission.
According to data from the Telecommunications Undersecretary (Subtel, 2020a), there is a wide variety of companies providing cable services across Chile, present in all 16 regions and representing a total of 1,760,368 subscribers as of September 2019. The Metropolitan Region, where the capital is located, has the single largest number of 213,068 subscribers, and the Aysén Region, located in the southern end of the country – although with the least number of subscribers, 10,743 out of a population of 66,568 – speaks of a high connectivity.
Companies offering satellite television are also present throughout the territory, with 1,505,912 users. Of these, the majority are concentrated in the central zone: the geographically adjacent Metropolitan, Valparaíso, and O’Higgins regions.
The offering of cable television includes the open national stations and two channels broadcasting national news 24 hours a day: 24 Horas from TVN, and CNN Chile from Warner Media Latin America.
Radio is the form of media that enjoys the widest access in the country. Data from the Telecommunications Undersecretary represents a total of 2,454 radio stations for the whole country, including FM (1,879), AM (147), minimal coverage (10), short wave (1), and community (417) stations. This is because of the technological ease of radio transmission and reception, as well as access to concessions in the radio-electric spectrum at regional levels. Radio is the only medium for which the Metropolitan Region does not concentrate most of the broadcasting stations; instead, they are concentrated in Los Lagos and Valparaíso, with the largest number of stations (Subtel, 2020b).
In Chile, the rate of Internet penetration is 78 per cent (Fernández Medina & Núñez-Mussa, 2019). The most current data provided by Subtel, from September 2019, shows three companies providing Internet services to all regions, one is concentrated in the southern zone and six others operate at specific locations. The total number of Internet subscribers nationwide is 3,434,402, with a total penetration of 17.88 per 100 people. The highest concentration of connections is in the Metropolitan Region (1,661,025), and the second-highest – though significantly lower – is Valparaíso Region (373,294). Mobile Internet has a higher impact on the total statistics, with 18,755,659 connections, of which 291,504 are neither 3G nor 4G. The total penetration rate per 100 inhabitants is 97.71, representing significantly wide access at the national level (Subtel, 2020c). All of these combined guarantees access to online versions of most national media. Newspapers El Mercurio and La Tercera have paywalls in their webpages, but other portals, such as television channels and radio signals, are open access. In addition, there are also a series of regional portals, which correspond to a citizen media network called Mi Voz, alongside the SoyChile network, with regional content, belonging to El Mercurio SAP.
