About Panorama

Panorama

Panorama was an illustrated news and political-analysis magazine first published in Buenos Aires in June 1963 by Editorial Abril, with its first issue dated 5 July 1963 in the directory's seed record. It was launched as a monthly under the slogan la revista de nuestro tiempo — the magazine of our time — as the fruit of a partnership between Editorial Abril and Time-Life, modelled on the American Time-Life news magazine. Its first sixty issues appeared monthly, with a carefully produced presentation supported by new printing technology imported from Italy, in which photography functioned not as a complement to the text but as an autonomous means of communication. From 1967, when Siete Días became independent from it, Panorama consolidated as Abril's political analysis magazine, and it was published until 1975, then relaunched in a second epoch from June 1976, before closing with the collapse of Editorial Abril's original enterprise in the late 1970s.

Editorial Abril and the Civita Enterprise

Panorama cannot be separated from Editorial Abril, one of the most important publishing companies in twentieth-century Argentine history. Its president, Cesare Civita, had arrived from Italy with his family fleeing fascist persecution, and in a few years he assembled the teams that launched such significant magazines as Idilio, Misterix, Rayo Rojo, Más Allá, Claudia, Siete Días Ilustrados and Corsa. Panorama was the house's entry into the modern news magazine field, built initially as a joint venture with Time-Life and the Italian Mondadori group. A couple of years after launch, Abril bought out Time's share and a Panorama company was constituted with capital of two million, its board composed of Cesare Civita as president, accompanied by his son Carlo Civita, Alberto Levi and Emanuele Diena. The magazine's newsroom was famously double at the start: one office on Avenida de las Américas in New York, at Time, from which directives came down, and another in Buenos Aires, at Leandro N. Alem 884.

Launch in 1963 and the News Magazine Model

Panorama appeared in June 1963, shortly before Arturo Illia arrived at the presidency, in a period characterised by great transformations and calls for modernisation in every field. The current-affairs magazines that proliferated in those years, encouraged by the sociocultural changes of the time, were inspired by the North American news magazine model and expressed a new, more interpretative journalism in which literature and information converged. Panorama hierarchised the visual dimension from its first number, announcing that its newsroom was divided into two groups: a stable team working in its offices and a mobile team of reporters and photographers ready to be sent anywhere. It offered colour notes, especially on foreign subjects, which was an advance in an era of black-and-white television. The magazine encouraged the use of surveys and opinion polls and teamwork, gave growing influence to photojournalism, and moved toward a greater protagonism of journalists in interviews conducted in a more informal tone.

Editorial Line: From Illia to Onganía

The editorial line of Panorama defined itself progressively. It became the voice of disillusion with the expectations generated by Illia's government, developing an anti-Peronist profile and joining the campaign of discredit against President Arturo Illia. During the dictatorship installed in 1966, Panorama supported the political programme of General Juan Carlos Onganía until, after the Cordobazo of 1969, it began to take critical distance from the military government, giving ever more space in its agenda to the question of Peronism, violence and social conflict. Its cover photography was itself studied by sociologists: the magazine's reproduction on its May 1966 cover of the March 1966 demonstration on Florida Street in Buenos Aires became a case study in the relation between sociology and photography. Young journalists worked in Panorama in a climate of great effervescence, addressing an agenda that ran from political current affairs to everyday life, and the magazine educated a generation of Argentine reporters in the interpretative weekly format.

Panorama and Siete Días

Panorama's history was intertwined with that of Siete Días, Abril's other great current-affairs title. Siete Días began inside Panorama's orbit — the seed record for Siete Días notes that it separated from the newspaper La Razón as a supplement before its independent launch — and from 1967, when Siete Días became independent, Panorama consolidated in the complementary role: Siete Días as the illustrated, photographic weekly of immediacy, Panorama as the house's magazine of political analysis. Together with Primera Plana, founded a year before Panorama in 1962, the two Abril titles defined the Argentine version of the American news magazine in the 1960s, a format that radically changed the graphic media landscape of the country in both journalistic practice and the use of photography. Readers who wanted the week's events interpreted, rather than merely recorded, were the audience Panorama was built to serve, and its longer, analytical notes distinguished it within the kiosk competition of the period.

The Third Peronism and the Crisis of the 1970s

The hardest chapter of Panorama's history came in the 1970s. Studies of the magazine during the third Peronism, between 1973 and 1975, showed a publication caught in the political struggles, violence and corruption of Argentina's tragedy of those years, as what remained of the publishing house's patrimony succumbed to internal political fights. The return of Peronism to power in 1973, the death of Perón, the government of Isabel Perón and the approach of the March 1976 coup formed a sequence in which an analytical political weekly had both its greatest relevance and its greatest exposure. Panorama was published until 1975 in its first epoch, and then, in a second epoch, from June 1976 — that is, already under the military dictatorship — according to the survey of Argentine political magazines from Peronism to the dictatorship. A magazine built on political interpretation had to operate, in that second epoch, within the censorship and self-censorship that characterised the dictatorship years.

Closure with Editorial Abril

Panorama closed with the collapse of the original Editorial Abril in the late 1970s, as the seed record states. The end of Abril as Civita's company came in 1977, when control passed from Celulosa Argentina to Angelo Rizzoli's organisation — a transfer Civita himself later insisted he had had no part in negotiating, in a published correction that also recorded that he had been forced to sell out after a series of threats to his life. Under those circumstances the Abril magazines of the Civita era ended together as a system, Panorama among them. The exact final issue date of Panorama's second epoch is not firmly established in the sources consulted for this profile, and no verified circulation figure for the magazine is given in them, so this profile states the limit openly rather than inventing precision: what is documented is the 1963 launch, the monthly run, the 1975 interruption, the June 1976 relaunch and the disappearance of the title with its publishing house at the end of the 1970s.

What Panorama Changed in Argentine Journalism

Panorama's contribution to Argentine journalism was formal as well as political. It normalised the interpretative news magazine in Argentina: reporting organised around analysis, polls, team reporting and autonomous photography rather than chronicle alone. Its investment in imported Italian printing machinery and colour reproduction raised the production standard for Argentine weeklies, and its stable-and-mobile newsroom structure professionalised the work of reporters and photographers. Historians of photography cited Panorama, alongside Primera Plana and Siete Días Ilustrados, as one of the significant titles that changed the country's graphic media. The catalogue of the Gino Germani Institute preserved its analytical contents — politics, economy, history, education, arts, sport and news across Argentina and Latin America — and the Hemeroteca and AHIRA preserved its issues, with full text available for numbers 1 to 60, from 1963 to 1968, allowing its first epoch to be studied issue by issue.

Legacy

The legacy of Panorama was that of the Abril system at its most ambitious: an Argentine attempt, in partnership first with Time-Life and then independently, to build a modern, visual, analytical weekly equal to its North American and Italian models. Scholars continued to write its history in detail — monographic studies of its covers, its editorial line, its years under the third Peronism and its place in the family of Argentine political magazines between 1973 and 1983 — which placed it among the most studied Argentine weeklies of its period. For the WorldNM directory, Panorama stands as Editorial Abril's political analysis magazine: launched in Buenos Aires in 1963 as la revista de nuestro tiempo, the magazine of our time, consolidated after 1967, interrupted in 1975, relaunched in 1976 and closed with its publishing house in the late 1970s. Its promise to be the magazine of its time was, in the end, literally fulfilled: few publications registered the hopes and the collapse of Argentina's 1960s and 1970s as completely as Panorama did.