About Extra

Extra

Extra was an independent political magazine published in Buenos Aires from 1 July 1965 to May 1989, directed by the journalist Bernardo Neustadt and published by Editorial El País. It was a monthly magazine of politics, economics and international affairs that served as Neustadt's personal platform for nearly a quarter of a century, and it formed part of the multimedia network that by the 1970s made its director one of the most established figures of Argentine graphic and television journalism of the twentieth century. Extra never attained the transcendence or prestige of Primera Plana or Confirmado, the other great political magazines of its founding moment, but it outlasted both of them, appearing without a change of director through the fall of Illia, the Onganía dictatorship, the return of Peronism, the Proceso and the democratic restoration, until its closure in May 1989.

Bernardo Neustadt Before Extra

Extra was unintelligible without its director, because the magazine was, by design, his voice. Bernardo Neustadt was born in 1925 in Romania, where his father worked at the Argentine embassy, and by the time he undertook Extra in the mid-1960s he had already exercised the journalistic profession for more than twenty years. He had entered the newspaper El Mundo as a youth of fifteen, worked as a chronicler at the sports magazine Racing, where he became secretary of the newsroom, and during the first Peronism he also performed government roles, including private secretary to Admiral Alberto Teisaire, press chief of the Superior Council of the Peronist Party and general director of relations with popular organisations. After the overthrow of Perón in 1955, that past was investigated, he was dismissed from El Mundo, and he rebuilt his career through a process of de-Peronisation: in 1957 he entered the politics section of Clarín with his own column, and in 1960 he returned to El Mundo as secretary of the newsroom in the renovation led with Jacobo Timerman. In 1964 he founded the magazine Todo, and a year later, Extra.

A Monthly for the Governing Classes

Extra was founded with the objective of addressing subjects related to politics, economics and the international plane, and it was oriented, in the judgement of scholars, to the governing classes. For Neustadt, his magazines constituted a fundamental bridge for establishing social links with the most favoured classes, and at the same time a prosperous business which, through advertising, allowed him to gain economic independence. That double function — platform and business — explained the magazine's durability. Extra integrated itself into the multimedia network of its director, which by the 1970s already included graphic, radio and television media, and material circulated among them: the director reproduced in Extra editorials and texts extracted from his other media, including the monthly Creer, published from 1975 to 1984 for the business world, and, especially, the transcribed interviews from his television programme Tiempo Nuevo, which had made him famous and remained on air, with interruptions and channel changes, for more than three decades from 1967.

The Director's Voice as Editorial Identity

It was without doubt the voice and particular journalistic style of its director that gave Extra its defined ideological profile. Studies of the magazine, based on the editorials and opinion notes signed by Neustadt as the institutional voice of the publication, identified its traits precisely: a certain lack of system in some themes, editorial positions traversed by personalism, the omnipresence of the journalist, and the influence of the conjuncture and pragmatism over long-term analysis. Neustadt's presence could be observed across the whole editorial surface, through his signature and photograph in the editorials, in the texts that introduced each number and in the opinion notes on current subjects. That personalism distinguished Extra from the team-edited weeklies of its era. Primera Plana and Confirmado had institutional styles that survived their founders; Extra had a founder who was the style, and the magazine's positions at any moment were, to an unusual degree, a record of one influential journalist's reading of the Argentine conjuncture.

Extra and the Internal Conflict of Peronism, 1973-1974

The best-studied chapter of Extra's history was its reading of the internal conflict of Peronism in 1973 and 1974, after the movement's return to power. A scholarly article devoted to those years took its title from the magazine's discourse — generational transfer is not ideological transfer — and used Neustadt's editorials to reconstruct how a liberal-conservative, anti-left voice inside the broad Peronist-era conversation argued against the radicalised youth who claimed Perón's legacy. The case showed Extra doing the work it was built for: intervening, monthly, in the struggle over the meaning of the governing movement, addressing an audience of officials, businessmen and officers rather than a mass public. It also showed the limits of the personal-platform model, in which the magazine's line on the central political question of the day was formulated as one man's editorial judgement, systematised across signed editorials rather than through reporting. Historians of the Argentine political press of 1973 to 1983 placed Extra, born in 1965, among the pre-existing titles that carried the interpretative journalism tradition into that violent decade.

Television, Radio and the Multimedia Network

From 1967, while he entered radio and when television had not yet completed its second decade in the country, Neustadt began the political journalism programme that accompanied him for almost the rest of his career and became his own brand: Tiempo Nuevo, a pioneer of the political debate genre, which in the 1980s became a ratings-leading success and made Neustadt, with his co-host Mariano Grondona, a reference of political journalism in television format. Extra lived inside that expanding fame. Interviews made for television reappeared transcribed in the magazine; editorials written for the magazine fed the programme; the monthly Creer addressed the business audience in parallel. The arrangement gave Extra a resilience that purely print titles lacked, because its costs and its audience were supported by a network, and it gave Neustadt an independence from any single employer that few Argentine journalists of his generation enjoyed. The magazine was, in that sense, an early Argentine example of the journalist as a multimedia proprietor rather than an employee.

Publishing Through Dictatorship and Democracy

Extra's run crossed every regime of its era. It was founded under Illia, continued under Onganía, published through the democratic interlude and the third Peronism, survived the Proceso dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 — the years in which Timerman was imprisoned, La Opinión expropriated and much of the independent press destroyed — and continued into the Alfonsín democracy. Scholars attributed Neustadt's capacity to sustain his media through those convulsed changes of political regime in part to an ability for updating and negotiation with the political authorities of the day, an ability that was itself part of his public reputation: admired as survival skill by some, criticised as accommodation by others. Extra's pages documented that trajectory monthly, and because its editorials were signed and photographed, they documented it personally. Few Argentine publications offered so continuous a single-voice record of the country's politics from 1965 to the end of the 1980s, and that continuity, whatever judgement is made of its positions, is the magazine's principal value to historians now.

Closure in May 1989

Extra ceased publication in May 1989, closing a run that had begun on 1 July 1965 under Editorial El País. The date placed its end in the terminal crisis of the Alfonsín government, amid hyperinflation and months before Neustadt's television career reached a new phase in the Menem era. No verified circulation figure for Extra is given in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is invented here; the magazine's own scholars noted that it never had the transcendence of the great weeklies, and its importance was never primarily numerical. What ended in May 1989 was a format: the director's monthly as the print anchor of a personal media network, at a moment when Argentine political journalism was migrating decisively to television, where Neustadt himself was already established. The print platform closed; the platform's builder continued, which confirmed, in retrospect, that Extra had always been one instrument among several in a single, unusually durable journalistic enterprise.

Legacy

The legacy of Extra was that of its model. It demonstrated, over twenty-four years, that a political magazine in Argentina could be sustained as the personal property and personal voice of one journalist, financed by advertising addressed to the governing classes and reinforced by radio and television, without belonging to a great publishing house. Academic study preserved it accordingly: critical discourse analyses of its editorials, studies of its director's media power and journalistic notoriety in the 1990s, and its inclusion in the histories of the Argentine political press all treated Extra as the exemplary case of the personalist magazine. For the WorldNM directory, Extra stands as Bernardo Neustadt's monthly: launched in Buenos Aires on 1 July 1965, published by Editorial El País, devoted to politics, economics and international affairs, and closed in May 1989. It was never Argentina's most prestigious political magazine. It was, for nearly a quarter of a century, its most personal one.