About Gente

Gente

Gente, originally called Gente y la actualidad, meaning People and Current Affairs, was an Argentine magazine published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Atlántida. Dedicated in large part to the personalities of show business and celebrity in Argentina, it also covered society and current affairs, and it became one of the country's most important celebrity magazines. First published on 29 July 1965, it appeared weekly for more than half a century before moving to monthly publication in 2021. Its most durable creation was not a single story but a ritual: Los Personajes del Año, the Characters of the Year, an end-of-year selection, cover and gala begun in 1966 that turned the magazine's judgement about who mattered that year into a fixture of Argentine cultural life. For generations of Argentine actors, presenters, models, athletes and public figures, appearing on that cover was itself a form of recognition.

Origins at Editorial Atlántida

Gente was a late flower of one of Argentina's oldest magazine houses. Editorial Atlántida was established in 1918 by the Uruguayan-Argentine publisher Constancio C. Vigil, who had earlier created the successful general-interest weekly Mundo Argentino and sold it to Editorial Haynes in 1917. From the sale he built his own publishing house, whose early titles defined Argentine magazine reading for decades: the current-events magazine Atlántida in 1918, the sports weekly El Gráfico and the children's magazine Billiken, both in 1919, and Para Ti, meaning For You, in 1922, described as the first women's magazine published in Argentina. Those three later titles were described in accounts of the house as among the oldest Argentine magazines still in publication and as circulation leaders in the Spanish-speaking world.

Vigil died in 1954, but the house remained part of the Vigil group. When Gente was launched in 1965, Atlántida therefore brought to it almost five decades of experience in illustrated magazines, printing, distribution and advertising, as well as sister titles that already reached children, sports readers and women readers. Reference accounts of Editorial Atlántida noted that with the 1965 launch of Gente the group became the local leader in women's magazines, a measure of how quickly the new title found its market, even though Gente itself ranged well beyond women's interest into celebrity, television, society and general interest.

Launch on 29 July 1965

The first issue of Gente appeared on 29 July 1965. The magazine's own retrospective marking sixty years of the title described the first number as a 48-page issue and remembered its cover in detail. The cover personality was the broadcaster Cacho Fontana, whose real name was Norberto Palese and who was billed on the cover through his programme as El show de Fontana. The cover story was written by Julio Lagos and was trailed as a life story running, in its own phrase, from Barracas to Tagle street: a neighbourhood girlfriend, a first salary, his wife, his daughter, his faith and the things he had never said. Photographs in the issue showed Fontana embracing his sixth-grade teacher, Néstor Blanch, and the front of Vieytes 926, the house of his childhood.

Lagos later recalled that he had been part of the founding group of Gente from the year before its appearance and for a couple of years afterwards, and described himself, with due modesty, as effectively the magazine's first staff writer, having arrived through sport and through Carlos Fontanarrosa. Before the first issue the team had prepared trial material, including dummy issues and an internal number zero circulated among advertising agencies, produced at the magazine's intended size. The care taken over that preparation reflected Atlántida's ambition: Gente was not an improvised launch but a considered attempt to give the house a modern title for a less traditional and more open sector of the Argentine middle class, as the magazine's own history of its founding put it.

Carlos Fontanarrosa and a New Visual Language

The central figure in that founding design was Carlos Fontanarrosa. According to Gente's own retrospective account, Atlántida's directors replaced Dante Panzeri with Fontanarrosa as director of El Gráfico, and with his freshness and imprint a great change began at the house that continued with Gente. Fontanarrosa then took charge of Gente y la actualidad, where, in the magazine's own words, he invented the double-page spread, the Chica de tapa, or cover girl, and Los Personajes del Año. The retrospective summarised the emerging formula simply: large photographs without margins around them, colour, easy reading and an interesting cover.

That formula distinguished Gente from the more traditional side of Atlántida, which Lagos recalled as the house of Para Ti, Chacra, El Gráfico and Billiken before it felt the need to experiment. Horacio de Dios was hired as the first head of the newsroom, and the founding staff worked through trial issues before the launch. The concept and design of the Argentine Gente were also influenced by the Italian magazine of the same name, Gente, giving the Buenos Aires title a European model for a photograph-led celebrity weekly as well as a local editorial team determined to adapt that model to Argentine television, radio, theatre and society.

Celebrity, Society and General Interest

In content, Gente was dedicated in large part to the figures of entertainment and show business in Argentina, while also covering subjects connected with society and current affairs. Its full original name, Gente y la actualidad, announced that double remit: people, and the news around them. Cover stories such as the long Fontana profile in the first issue set the pattern of the intimate celebrity interview, built on home visits, family photographs, personal confession and the contrast between a humble origin and present fame. Alongside such profiles the magazine covered weddings, separations, television programmes, fashion and the social season, and it did so in a Buenos Aires-centred world whose faces readers already knew from television, radio, cinema and the theatre.

That mixture made Gente both a gossip magazine, as it is often described, and a general-interest record of Argentine public life. Politicians, writers, musicians and sports figures appeared in its pages alongside actors and models, a breadth that was built into its signature annual selection from the start. Its Spanish-language weekly rhythm, celebrity access and photographic presentation gave it a place in Argentine popular culture distinct from the news magazines and newspapers of the same period: where a newsmagazine explained power, Gente showed its readers the people, and showed those people at home, dressed for a gala, or gathered together once a year on a single cover.

Personajes del Año

Los Personajes del Año began in 1966, only a year after the magazine's launch, and the magazine described it, fifty-seven years later, as a classic in the history of Argentine media. At the end of each year the most outstanding personalities were selected and photographed to form what the magazine called the most emblematic cover in the country. The first selection, for 1966, was printed in January 1967, when the magazine was only two years old. It had just fifteen chosen figures, among them the journalist and presenter Nicolás Pipo Mancera, the actress Graciela Borges, the poet Leopoldo Marechal, the painter Raúl Soldi, the actress and singer Lolita Torres, the composer Alberto Ginastera and the humorist Carlos Colombre, known as Landrú.

The scale grew with the decades. The 1970 selection included sixteen figures and featured Susana Giménez. The selection for 1973, printed on 31 January 1974 in issue number 445, brought the number of guests to twenty-one and marked the first appearance in the feature of Mirtha Legrand, who from then on became a central and almost invariable presence in its photographs. The magazine's archive piece on that edition noted that its print run reached 384,000 copies, a figure it described as colossal for the time. By the twenty-first century the annual event had become a full gala with a red carpet, as well as a cover. The 2021 gala was held on 9 December at the Alvear Palace Hotel, and the 2024 edition was held at the Faena Art Center in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires, with around eighty guests from entertainment, sport, health and politics, a black-tie dress code, and Susana Giménez, Mirtha Legrand and Marcelo Tinelli among the figures the magazine called its unfailing presences.

Landmark Editions and the Pandemic Year

The history of Personajes del Año also recorded the exceptions that tested the ritual. The magazine recalled that the 1970 selection, rather than appearing as the cover of its issue, appeared only as a double-page poster in the centre of issue number 286, dated 14 January 1971. The 2020 edition was, in the magazine's words, the only gala in its history held during a pandemic. Under a strict health protocol, the chosen personalities were photographed individually at the Palacio Errázuriz, home since 1937 to the National Museum of Decorative Art in Buenos Aires, and the photographs were then assembled to form the expected cover. That edition selected fifty-one people, and the magazine noted that essential health workers, scientists and social assistance had been central to a year in which the entertainment industry was restricted. Even in altered form, the annual cover was produced, which showed how firmly the institution had been established inside the magazine's own calendar.

The Dictatorship Years and Criticism

Gente's long history also carried a contested chapter. The magazine was published throughout the period of the National Reorganization Process, the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, and it received criticism for supporting that regime. The criticism was recorded in reference accounts of the magazine, and scholarly writing on the period listed Editorial Atlántida's magazines, including Gente, Somos and Para Ti, among the publications that supported the military regime and defended its record. That judgement formed part of a wider Argentine reckoning, after the return of democracy in 1983, with the role of major media during the dictatorship years. Any full account of Gente therefore had to hold two facts together: the magazine was a hugely popular chronicler of Argentine celebrity and society in those years, and its stance during the dictatorship was later criticised in its own country as support for the regime then in power.

Reach and Distribution

Gente's reach was described in its reference listing by the countries in which it circulated: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, the United States, Paraguay and Uruguay. That distribution reflected the wider Latin American circulation long associated with Atlántida's magazines, even though Gente's editorial world remained firmly Argentine and centred on Buenos Aires. The seed claim that the title itself was a circulation leader across the Spanish-speaking world was not verified in the sources consulted for this profile; the circulation-leader description in accounts of Editorial Atlántida was attached to the house's earlier titles, El Gráfico, Billiken and Para Ti, rather than specifically to Gente. What was verified was more precise: Gente was considered one of the most important celebrity or gossip magazines in Argentina, Atlántida became the local leader in women's magazines with its launch, and a single annual edition in the mid-1970s was reported by the magazine itself to have printed 384,000 copies. Its international circulation list showed that its Argentine celebrities were read well beyond Argentina's borders.

From Weekly to Monthly

For most of its life Gente kept the rhythm on which it was founded. It was published weekly from 1965 until 2020, a run of fifty-five years of weekly issues that carried it from the black-and-white television age into the age of social media. From 2021 its print frequency changed to monthly. The change reflected the same pressures that reshaped magazine publishing across Argentina and the wider Spanish-speaking world, as celebrity news moved to continuous digital publication and a printed magazine became a monthly object rather than a weekly habit. The annual Personajes del Año, significantly, survived the change of frequency: the gala and its cover continued to be staged each December, including the editions of 2021, 2023 and 2024 described in the magazine's own coverage, preserving in monthly form the ritual invented in its second year of weekly publication.

Digital Presence and Current Status

In its digital form Gente was published at revistagente.com, within Grupo Atlántida, the group whose subscription service listed its Buenos Aires address as Elcano 3847 and identified it as the publisher of Gente and Para Ti Deco, among other products. The group presented its brands together as Gente, Para Ti, Paparazzi, Billiken and its other digital properties, and described a strategy of original digital formats, interactive content and expansion across Latin America. Gente's own site carried its entertainment, celebrity, society and current-affairs coverage continuously, including its extensive retrospective archive work marking sixty years since the first issue, in which founding staff such as Julio Lagos retraced the forty-eight pages of issue number one.

Gente therefore remained, into its seventh decade, an active Argentine magazine title: monthly in print since 2021, digital and multiplatform in its presentation, based in Buenos Aires, published in Spanish by the Atlántida group its founder's house had built, and still identified above all by the cover it invented in 1966. From Cacho Fontana on the first cover in July 1965 to the assembled galas of Personajes del Año in the 2020s, its record was the record of Argentine celebrity as one Buenos Aires magazine chose, year after year, to photograph it.