Ernestina Herrera de Noble

Ernestina Laura Herrera de Noble (7 June 1925 – 14 June 2017) was a prominent Argentine publisher and executive. She was the largest shareholder of the Grupo Clarín media conglomerate and director of the flagship Clarín newspaper. She was the first woman to become director of a mainstream newspaper in South America.

Life and times

Ernestina Laura Herrera was born in Buenos Aires in 1925. She became a Flamenco dancer and met the founding publisher of Clarín, Roberto Noble, around 1950. The two maintained a sporadic relationship until Noble and his wife, Guadalupe Zapata, were divorced in the early 1960s. She and the publisher were married in 1967; Roberto Noble died of cancer on January 12, 1969.

As his widow, she inherited a controlling stake in Clarín, Argentina's most widely circulated newspaper since 1965. Despite its large circulation, however, Clarín suffered financial difficulties when Mrs. Noble inherited the director's post. She turned to one of the late Roberto Noble's most prominent allies, economist and wholesaler Rogelio Julio Frigerio, who lent Clarín US$10 million, in 1971. The paper continued to endorse Frigerio's centrist MID platform, which centered on government support for infrastructure investment and import substitution industrialization. On Frigerio's advice, Mrs. Noble brought in Héctor Magnetto, who took charge of the newspaper's finances.