About Viva

Viva

Viva is the Sunday magazine of Clarín, Argentina's largest newspaper, published in Buenos Aires by Grupo Clarín. Distributed each week with the Sunday edition of Clarín, it is a general-interest magazine in Spanish that combines current affairs, interviews, culture, lifestyle and everyday life in a single illustrated package designed for Sunday reading. For almost three decades it appeared as a separate magazine-format supplement, and since April 2023 it has continued as part of the body of the newspaper itself, merged with the Viajes travel supplement and Spot, the entertainment supplement. That long run in two formats makes Viva both a magazine in its own right and a central piece of how Clarín has presented itself to its readers on the day when the newspaper traditionally reaches its widest audience.

Origins and the Sunday Magazine Tradition at Clarín

Viva did not appear from nowhere. Clarín, founded by Roberto Noble on 28 August 1945, was an early innovator in the Argentine Sunday market. On 21 August 1960 Clarín launched Clarín Revista, described as the first Sunday magazine offered by an Argentine newspaper, initially in a 20-page, two-colour edition. That publication established the habit of a substantial illustrated Sunday supplement accompanying the newspaper, supplied over the years to Clarín readers and, in the newspaper's earlier expansion, to provincial newspapers as well. Clarín Revista continued for more than three decades until its final issue on 12 June 1994. Viva was its direct successor, created as a relaunch with a new name, a new design and a faster, more contemporary approach to the same Sunday promise: to inform and to entertain in one publication. Understanding Viva therefore requires understanding that lineage, because the magazine inherited both an audience and an expectation built since 1960.

The 1994 Relaunch

The first issue of Viva was published on Sunday, 19 June 1994. Its first cover featured dancer Julio Bocca and model Valeria Mazza, a pairing that signalled the editorial formula from the outset: Argentine figures of national recognition, strong photography and a mixture of serious reporting with celebrity and culture. From that relaunch until April 2023, Viva published 1,505 issues in magazine format, a figure that underlines its regularity and its place in Argentine homes. The relaunch coincided with a broader modernisation at Clarín in the 1990s, when colour printing expanded, the main newspaper was redesigned and Clarín.com launched in 1996. Viva was positioned within that renewal as the modern face of Sunday Clarín, distinct from the older Clarín Revista in pace and presentation while preserving the idea that Sunday deserved a publication of its own, separate from the weekday newspaper's news sections and supplements.

Publisher, Headquarters and Place Within Grupo Clarín

Viva is published in Buenos Aires as part of Clarín, whose publisher is Grupo Clarín, the media conglomerate formally organised under that name from 1999 and operating across newspapers, radio, television, internet and other media. The magazine has no separate identity from that structure: it is Clarín's Sunday magazine, edited within the newspaper's newsroom and distributed with the newspaper. Its history is therefore closely tied to Clarín's own trajectory under founder Roberto Noble, who died in 1969, and his widow and successor Ernestina Herrera de Noble, who directed the newspaper for many years, and to the group's later development as Argentina's largest media organisation. For readers, the practical consequence was straightforward. Buying Clarín on Sunday meant receiving Viva, and Viva's covers, interviews and special issues became part of the shared Sunday experience of Clarín's national circulation rather than the product of a standalone newsstand magazine competing on its own.

Content, Sections and Editorial Formula

From the beginning Viva defined itself by breadth. Its pages have combined politics and economics with history, social analysis, science, technology and ecology, alongside entertainment reporting on figures from sport, culture and show business. Everyday and consumer subjects have always sat alongside those more rigorous topics: fashion with photographic productions, including special winter and summer issues; design and decoration; beauty products and health treatments; and a cultural agenda covering shows, launches, exhibitions and events. A dedicated cooking corner was for a long period associated with journalist Blanca Cotta, a historic presence at Clarín, and chef Narda Lepes. The magazine also published special issues devoted to subjects such as wines, watches, fitness, gourmet cooking and the environment, and in 2021 it published extra Tuesday issues for the first and only time. The formula was deliberately versatile, intended to hold a whole family of Sunday readers with different interests inside a single publication.

Regular Features, Humour and Columnists

Over its magazine-format years Viva developed a set of recognisable regular features. They included Infografía, an infographics section that won numerous local and international awards; El Reportaje Atrevido, a fortnightly interview feature conducted by television host Jorge Guinzburg; El Diario Íntimo de Matías, the humour page by Sendra, which later moved to the back page of the daily newspaper; brief news items under changing titles such as Domingo Siete; a horoscope by astrologer Sonia Larsen; retrospective features on famous figures; readers' childhood anecdotes; expert commentary; uncompromising interviews; and Plaza de papel, a weekly page for children with games devised by Ana Arias and illustrations by Estela Caponi and Lizán. Graphic humour held a prominent place, with contributions associated with Roberto Fontanarrosa and his character Inodoro Pereyra, Quino and Caloi, and later Argentine cartoonists including Bernardo Erlich and Darío Adanti. The magazine's columnists and contributors over the years included Beatriz Sarlo, Rosa Montero, Paulo Coelho, Vicente Battista, Fernando Savater, Martín Caparrós, Marcelo Birmajer and Tamara Di Tella, among others, giving Viva a literary and intellectual presence beyond its celebrity covers.

Covers, Photography and Cultural Presence

Viva became particularly known for its covers and high-impact photography. Argentine personalities who appeared on its covers included Ricardo Darín, Marcelo Tinelli, Gustavo Cerati, Mario Pergolini, Susana Giménez, Natalia Oreiro, Charly García, Mercedes Sosa, Norma Aleandro, Fito Páez, Luisana Lopilato, Adrián Suar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Mirtha Legrand, Diego Maradona and César Milstein, while international figures included Antonio Banderas, John Lennon, Kate Moss, Marilyn Monroe, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton and Ray Bradbury. The covers were not limited to fame. The magazine placed social subjects at the centre of its presentation, including drug use among young people, the arrival of social networks, blended families, organ transplantation, gun ownership and HIV and AIDS, and it highlighted young Argentines who had succeeded abroad, such as dancer Paloma Herrera, actor Leonardo Sbaraglia and footballer Lionel Messi. It also devoted covers to historical subjects. That combination of portrait, interview and social theme helped make Viva a widely recognised visual record of Argentine public life at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Special Projects and Redesigns

Viva was redesigned repeatedly during its magazine years, with redesigns recorded from 1998 onwards and continuing in 2003, 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2014, reflecting efforts to keep its format modern as reading habits and print design changed. Among its most noted special projects, in December 1999, to mark the arrival of the year 2000, Viva distributed free of charge a photographic album titled Argentinos: Retratos de fin de milenio. Produced over more than a year by photojournalists and leading Argentine writers, it interleaved portraits of representative and ordinary people in the country, including politicians, famous figures, immigrants, marginalised people and intellectuals, with ten letters addressed to readers of the future. The production later became an exhibition abroad. Projects of that kind showed the ambition Viva could carry as the Sunday showcase of a major newspaper: not only weekly interviews and service material, but collectable, large-scale editorial work intended to be kept and consulted.

Audience and the Sunday Reading Habit

Viva's audience was the audience of Sunday Clarín, which for decades was Argentina's highest-circulation newspaper and one of the most widely circulated in the Spanish-speaking world. No separate circulation figure for Viva alone is needed to understand its reach: it travelled with every copy of the Sunday newspaper, into homes in Buenos Aires and across the country. Its editorial choices reflect that mass Sunday readership. It had to speak simultaneously to readers interested in politics and history, to readers looking for interviews with performers and sports figures, and to readers seeking cooking, fashion, health and cultural guidance for the week ahead. In its early years that practicality, together with its union of investigative journalism and interviews with popular figures, earned the magazine prestige and made it an object of consultation and collection for some readers. Critically, it has been treated as a publication that helps explain Argentine identity at the turn of the century, precisely because it recorded both public events and private, everyday concerns in the same pages.

From Magazine Format to Newspaper Supplement

In April 2023 Viva published its last issue as a separate magazine and passed to being a regular supplement forming part of the body of Clarín, fused with the Viajes and Spot supplements. The change ended the 1,505-issue magazine-format run that began in 1994 but did not end the Viva name or its Sunday role. Horacio Convertini has been its editor in chief since 2014, spanning both the later magazine years and the current format. Recent contributors have included culinary journalist Pietro Sorba, historian Felipe Pigna, doctor Norberto Abdala, entertainment journalist Pablo Schanton, critic Pablo Scholz and teacher Tomás Balmaceda, alongside journalism associated with Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú and psychoanalyst José Eduardo Abadi in its more recent stage. In 2026 Clarín also launched Voy!, described as a companion supplement to Viva accompanying the newspaper on Saturdays with the same format and design as the Sunday magazine but fewer pages and oriented toward middle-aged readers, a sign that the Viva model continues to shape Clarín's weekend publishing.

Digital Presence and Current Status

Viva exists today within Clarín's wider digital ecosystem rather than as an independently branded website. Clarín launched Clarín.com in March 1996, and the newspaper's online portal became the most visited news portal in Argentina. Viva content is encountered by readers through Clarín's Sunday newspaper in print and through the newspaper's digital platforms, where the distinction between a physical supplement and an online section is less sharp than it was in 1994. Its current status must therefore be stated precisely. Viva is no longer a standalone weekly magazine sold or distributed as a separate magazine object, as it was from 1994 to April 2023. It continues as Clarín's Sunday general-interest supplement, incorporated into the newspaper and preserving the name, the weekend timing and much of the breadth, interviews, culture, lifestyle and service journalism, that defined the magazine for nearly three decades.