About Noticias

Noticias

Noticias, whose full title was Noticias de la Semana, meaning News of the Week, was a weekly Spanish-language newsmagazine published in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Argentina it was known simply as Noticias, meaning News. Published by Editorial Perfil, it occupied a distinctive place in Argentine journalism as a magazine built around political investigation, a striking cover image and a weekly synthesis of national life. Its history stretched from the Argentina of the mid-1970s, when it first appeared under another name, through the return of democracy, the presidencies of Carlos Menem, Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and into the digital era. Along the way it became associated with two of the most consequential press-freedom cases in modern Argentina: a civil lawsuit brought by a sitting president over reporting on his private life, and the murder of its photojournalist José Luis Cabezas.

From La Semana to Noticias

The magazine was first issued on 17 November 1976 under the name La Semana, meaning The Week. It was founded by Jorge Fontevecchia, who founded the publishing house Editorial Perfil in the same year together with his father. For its first thirteen years the title appeared as La Semana, establishing itself during a period that included the final years of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and the first years of restored democracy after 1983. In 1989 the magazine was relaunched under the name by which it became nationally known. The relaunch as Noticias took place on 14 November 1989, in the first year of the presidency of Carlos Menem. The change of name shortened and sharpened the title while the fuller form, Noticias de la Semana, was retained as its formal name. From that point the single word Noticias was the brand readers saw on newsstands across Argentina.

The timing of both the founding and the relaunch mattered. A weekly magazine launched in 1976 had to operate in a country under military rule, where journalism faced severe constraints. A magazine relaunched in 1989, by contrast, addressed a democratic Argentina preoccupied with a new government, economic upheaval and the changing relationship between political power and the press. Noticias developed its reputation in that second, democratic context, where a weekly could investigate, provoke and argue in ways that had not been possible in its earliest years.

Editorial Perfil and the Fontevecchia Family

Noticias was part of Editorial Perfil, the publishing house Jorge Fontevecchia founded with his father in 1976. Perfil grew from magazines into a broader Argentine media group. According to the Media Ownership Monitor, Editorial Perfil also published the newspaper Perfil, first printed twice a week with a daily online version, and magazines including Caras, Semanario, Hombre, Look, Mía, Luz, Parabrisas, Fortuna, Weekend, Super Campo and Luna Teen. In 2018 the group also launched the open television channel Net TV. The Monitor recorded the group's Buenos Aires contact address as California 2715, in the city of Buenos Aires, and described Gustavo González as having become president and chief executive of Editorial Perfil in late 2016.

Within that group, Noticias held a particular position. The newspaper Perfil gave the house a newspaper identity, while Noticias was its flagship weekly magazine of politics and current affairs. The magazine's fortunes were therefore closely tied to the wider company's disputes and strategies, especially its long-running argument with national governments over the distribution of official advertising, a dispute in which Noticias and its sister titles were treated as a single critical publishing house. Fontevecchia himself remained the public face of the group for decades and was personally a defendant, alongside his editor, in the most famous lawsuit the magazine faced.

A Newsmagazine Modelled on Time and Newsweek

From its foundation, Noticias was published in a format similar to the American newsmagazines Time and Newsweek. That model had a recognisable grammar: a strong cover built around a single person or theme, a lead story that attempted to sum up the week in politics or society, and supporting reporting, interviews, photography and commentary gathered inside. The comparison was made explicitly in reference accounts of the magazine, which described Fontevecchia publishing it in the format of those United States publications. The model suited a weekly rhythm. Noticias did not compete to break news hour by hour; it competed to interpret the week, to put a face on power and to present investigation and narrative together between covers.

Photography was central to that formula. The cover photograph was not decoration but argument, a point the magazine demonstrated repeatedly and at great cost in the case of José Luis Cabezas. Inside, the newsmagazine format allowed longer reporting than a daily newspaper item and a more visual presentation than a purely political review. Politics was the core subject, but the remit described for the magazine also covered society and celebrity, reflecting a format in which a president, a businessman, an artist and a public scandal could all become cover material if they explained something about Argentina at that moment.

Politics, Society and the Cover as Argument

The editorial mix of Noticias combined political investigation with coverage of society and famous people. That combination was deliberate in the Time and Newsweek tradition, where public affairs dominated but cultural and social reporting gave the magazine its breadth. In the Argentine case, the mix produced covers that could be investigative, satirical or deliberately provocative. A cover was expected to be talked about, disputed and, on occasion, denounced by the people it depicted.

An example came in 2014, when the magazine, then described as directed by Jorge Fontevecchia, carried an image of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner depicted as crucified. Cardinal Mario Poli, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, publicly rejected the magazine's decision to carry that image. The episode illustrated, in a single cover, how far the magazine was prepared to go in using religious and political symbolism to make an editorial point, and how quickly such a cover could move beyond the newsstand into a national argument involving the Church as well as the presidency. It also showed that the provocation was not a late invention but a continuation of a cover-led approach that had defined the title since its relaunch.

The Menem Stories and the Inter-American Court

The magazine's best-documented legal battle began with a series of articles about President Carlos Saúl Menem. As summarised by the Global Freedom of Expression project at Columbia University from the case record, Noticias published pieces referring to the existence of an unacknowledged son of the president with a congresswoman, to large sums of money and expensive gifts provided by the president to the congresswoman and the child, to meetings between them at the Casa de Gobierno, and to alleged death threats against the child and subsequent contacts between the presidents of Argentina and Paraguay to secure asylum for the child and his mother in Paraguay. The articles were accompanied by photographs of Menem, the congresswoman and their son, with the child's image distorted so that he could not be recognised.

Menem filed a civil lawsuit against the publishing house and against Jorge Fontevecchia and Héctor D'Amico, the director and editor of Noticias, claiming a violation of his right to privacy and seeking one and a half million Argentine pesos in moral damages. Argentina's Supreme Court ultimately sentenced the defendants to pay sixty thousand pesos. The case then reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as Fontevecchia and D'Amico v. Argentina. That court found that the information published had already been part of the public domain and carried public interest, that the later imposition of civil liability did not meet the requirement of necessity, and that it infringed the right to freedom of expression. The case became a regional precedent on the balance between a public official's privacy and reporting on matters of public interest, and it attached the name of Noticias to one of the leading freedom-of-expression judgments in the Americas.

José Luis Cabezas

No episode marked Noticias more deeply than the murder of its photographer José Luis Cabezas. Cabezas was born on 28 November 1961 in Wilde, in Buenos Aires Province, and worked as a news photographer and reporter for Noticias. In February 1996, in the seaside resort of Pinamar, he took a photograph of the reclusive businessman Alfredo Yabrán walking on the beach with his wife. The photograph was published on the cover of Noticias in March 1996, with investigations into Yabrán and his businesses, and it unveiled Yabrán's face to the public. Accounts of the case recalled that Yabrán had boasted that not even the intelligence services had his photographs, which made the published image a journalistic landmark in itself.

On 25 January 1997, while on assignment for Noticias covering the summer season in Pinamar, Cabezas was kidnapped and murdered. He was shot and his body was found handcuffed inside a burned car, a Ford Fiesta that Noticias had rented for him to work that season. The Inter American Press Association later described the crime as perpetrated by the gang known as Los Horneros allegedly on behalf of Yabrán. Argentine courts convicted eight people for the kidnapping and death, and the courts found that the murder had been planned by Yabrán, who died by suicide in 1998. The murder shocked Argentine society and its politicians, was widely covered by Argentine media, and became a painful symbol in the history of Argentine journalism. Demonstrations kept his image in public view accompanied by the phrase No se olviden de Cabezas, meaning Do Not Forget Cabezas. For Noticias, the loss was both personal and institutional: its photographer had been killed for a photograph the magazine had published on its cover.

Government Advertising and the Courts

Noticias and Editorial Perfil also became central to a long dispute over official advertising. Reference accounts reported that former President Néstor Kirchner ordered government advertising to be withheld from the magazine and from other media critical of his government, while supporting media were privileged instead. Editorial Perfil sued the government over that distribution, and the courts supported the magazine's claim. Chief of Staff Aníbal Fernández denied any discrimination against the publisher, a statement Perfil refuted.

The dispute produced a ruling noted internationally. On 4 March 2011 the Committee to Protect Journalists welcomed a ruling by Argentina's Supreme Court that called for the omission of discriminatory criteria and a reasonable balance in the allocation of state advertising. The ruling stemmed, the Committee said, from a 2006 injunction filed by Editorial Perfil, which it described as the country's largest magazine publisher, claiming arbitrary distribution of official advertising. Together with the Menem case, the advertising litigation gave Noticias a second, distinct place in Argentine press-freedom history: not only reporting that a president tried to punish through the courts, but a publisher's challenge to the use of state advertising money as a tool of reward and punishment.

Editors and Leadership

Jorge Fontevecchia was the founding figure throughout, as founder of both the magazine in 1976 and its publishing house. Héctor D'Amico was identified in the Inter-American case as the editor of Noticias at the time of the Menem articles, with Fontevecchia as its director, and the two men were co-defendants and then co-petitioners in that case. A later generation of leadership was represented by Gustavo González. The Media Ownership Monitor recorded that in 2003 Fontevecchia appointed González as director of Noticias, where González had started work as editor-in-chief, and that he held the directorship until January 2011. González then worked as editor-in-chief of Editorial Perfil until late 2016, when he became the group's president and chief executive. Reference listings for the magazine also named Gustavo González as its editorial director. That progression, from the magazine's newsroom to the top of the whole Perfil group, indicated the weight Noticias carried inside its own publishing house.

Circulation, Audience and the Buenos Aires Base

Noticias was a national Argentine magazine produced in Buenos Aires, the country's capital and its centre of national politics, publishing and broadcast media. Its subjects were drawn from national government in Buenos Aires, but its defining assignment in the Cabezas story took its staff to Pinamar, the Atlantic resort where politicians and business figures spent the summer and where its photographer was working when he was killed. The magazine's verified circulation figure in the sources consulted was a total circulation of 58,000 recorded for 2011. No later audited circulation figure was verified for this profile, and none is claimed. The magazine was published weekly and in Spanish throughout the period described, and its reputation rested less on mass scale than on agenda-setting: a cover or an investigation in Noticias could become the subject of argument by presidents, cardinals, courts and other media, which is a form of reach that a circulation total alone does not capture.

Digital Presence and Later Years

Like other Perfil titles, Noticias developed an online presence alongside print, published on the web at noticias.perfil.com as part of the Perfil group's digital operation. The online edition extended the weekly magazine's reporting, covers and interviews beyond the printed issue and placed it within a group that, by 2018, had expanded from magazines and a newspaper into open television with Net TV. In its later years the magazine continued to be listed as a weekly newsmagazine published by Editorial Perfil in Argentina, in Spanish, under the name by which it had been known since 1989. Its historical identity, however, was already fixed by the record of its first decades: a Time and Newsweek-style weekly founded as La Semana in 1976, relaunched as Noticias in 1989, tested in the Inter-American Court over its reporting on a president, and permanently marked by the 1997 murder of José Luis Cabezas, the photographer whose Yabrán cover photograph became one of the most famous and most costly images in Argentine journalism.