About Semanario

Semanario

Semanario is an Argentine show-business and popular-interest weekly magazine published by Editorial Perfil in Buenos Aires. It is one of the oldest and most recognisable titles in the history of that publishing house: created in November 1979, it became, in the words of its own publishing record, the first great success of Editorial Perfil S.A., and after circulating through the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and part of the 2010s it was relaunched in June 2020 following a break of about four years. Few Argentine magazines can claim two distinct lives separated by four decades, and fewer still can claim to have shaped the format of an entire segment of the popular press. Semanario did both, first as a broad family magazine printed on newsprint and later as a magazine devoted mainly to entertainment and celebrity news, the farándula that remains its best-known territory today.

Origins and founding in 1979

Semanario was created in 1979 by the journalist José Andrés Soto, from Mar del Plata, at the instigation of the editor Jorge Fontevecchia. Its formal founding is dated to November 1979, and its founders are listed as José Andrés Soto and Jorge Alberto Fontevecchia. The timing matters. Editorial Perfil itself had been created only three years earlier, on 1 June 1976, from the merger of Alberto Fontevecchia's Linotipia Fobera and Jorge Fontevecchia's SEPAL. The young publishing house needed a popular weekly that could sell in very large numbers at newsstands, and Semanario was designed to be exactly that product. It succeeded quickly enough to be remembered as the house's first major commercial triumph, the title that proved Perfil could compete in the mass market for magazines and not only in more specialised niches.

A different kind of popular magazine

In its beginnings, Semanario was graphically inspired by the high-circulation North American tabloids. It was printed on newspaper paper, with a layout style rooted in the 1940s, and it valued the quality of its content over its image. That choice set it apart from the popular magazines of earlier decades. Rather than resting its sales on blood and sex, the early Semanario offered more than one hundred articles of family and personal interest in each issue, especially on medicine and general topics, with a smaller share devoted to the world of entertainment. The formula was deliberately broad: a magazine a whole household could read, bought for practical and human-interest content as much as for celebrity news. Its readers' letters feature, the correo de amigos, is credited with bringing together hundreds of couples across the country, an unusual social footnote that underlines how personally many readers engaged with the magazine in the years before social media existed.

Editors, contributors and newsroom

Across its different stages Semanario was directed by Andrés Soto, Daniel Pliner, Samuel Gelblung, Marcelo Pichel, Carlos De Simone, Claudio Gurmindo, Carlos Piro and Marcela Tarrio. Its early contributors included Alberto Cormillot, Julia Prilutzky Farny, Arnaldo Rascovsky, Antonio Las Heras, Ulises Barrera, Alberto Migré, Valentín Komar, Miguel Bellizi, Emy de Molina, Jorge Carnevale, Enrique David Borthiry, Lily Süllos and Uri Geller, as well as the South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who visited Argentina in 1980 as a guest of the magazine. Dozens of photographers passed through its newsroom, among them José Luis Cabezas, the photojournalist whose later work for the sister magazine Noticias and whose 1997 murder became one of the most consequential press-freedom cases in Argentine history. The breadth of that contributor list, mixing doctors, writers, astrologers, television figures and reporters, reflects the magazine's original design as a general service and entertainment weekly rather than a narrow celebrity title.

Circulation, reach and imitations

The published record of Semanario gives a sense of its scale in its first decade. In its first ten years, more than fifty million copies were sold, almost two thirds of them in the interior of Argentina rather than in Buenos Aires, which underlines that this was a genuinely national magazine and not only a metropolitan one. For many years it was also the highest-circulation magazine in neighbouring Uruguay, and its listed circulation territory covered Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and the United States. Its format was reproduced by fourteen publications, of which the most successful were Flash and Tal Cual, a measure of how influential its low-cost, high-volume model became for competitors. Between 1985 and 1989 a Portuguese-language edition was published in Brazil, directed by Edgardo Martolio, extending the title beyond the Spanish-speaking market during its strongest years.

Change of format and turn to entertainment

Semanario changed its format for the first time at the end of the 1980s, and over the following years it renewed its graphic structure and its editorial formula several times. From the middle of the 1990s, its content became mostly entertainment and celebrity coverage. That shift mirrored the wider transformation of Argentine popular media in that decade, when television-driven celebrity culture expanded and magazines that had once mixed medicine, service journalism and human interest increasingly concentrated on the farándula. Publisher descriptions of the later Semanario summarised the offer plainly: all the information about show business and the best-kept secrets of the celebrities, combined, in a survival of the older formula, with consumer-defence information and coverage of traditional and alternative medicine and natural therapies with professional advice. The magazine kept its weekly frequency and its identity as a newsstand product aimed at a mass readership.

Closure, hiatus and the 2020 relaunch

The magazine's first life ended in the mid-2010s, after some thirty-seven years in the kiosks, as Argentine print economics deteriorated and readers and advertisers moved online. In June 2020, however, Semanario returned to circulation after four years of recess. Perfil presented the comeback as the return of an emblematic title of Argentine entertainment journalism, and the relaunch formed part of a broader moment in which the publisher, by its own account in industry interviews, saw lockdown-era saturation with digital information as an opening for print weeklies; in 2021 Perfil launched additional weekly magazines alongside the titles it already had. The relaunched Semanario is listed among Editorial Perfil's current magazines, categorised under entertainment, and it carries the same ISSN, 0328-4298, that identifies the title in bibliographic records.

Place within Editorial Perfil

To understand Semanario it helps to place it inside its publishing house. Editorial Perfil, headquartered at California 2715 in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Barracas, grew from a magazine specialist into a multimedia group producing the newspaper Perfil, magazines such as Noticias, Caras, Fortuna, Parabrisas, Weekend and Marie Claire, and later television and radio outlets. Within that portfolio, Semanario occupies the popular entertainment slot: cheaper, more celebrity-focused and more mass-market than the political weekly Noticias or the society magazine Caras. Media Ownership Monitor Argentina lists Semanario among the magazines edited by the group founded by Alberto and Jorge Fontevecchia, and Perfil's own corporate listings continue to group it with the house's entertainment titles, alongside the digital entertainment brand Exitoína.

Digital presence

The relaunched magazine has an official web home at semanario.perfil.com, within the Perfil network of magazine sites. That presence matters because the contemporary Argentine magazine market is hybrid: print editions survive at kiosks and by subscription, while day-to-day celebrity news moves at digital speed. Semanario's social and digital identity, historically promoted under handles referring to the revista, extends the brand between weekly issues. Publisher media-kit material in the mid-2010s already presented Semanario as a combined print and digital property, with its online edition carrying the same mixture of celebrity coverage, consumer advice and health content as the printed magazine. Readers encountering the title today are therefore as likely to meet it through a shared story online as through the printed weekly itself.

Buenos Aires context

Semanario is a product of Buenos Aires, the capital city and media centre of Argentina, where the country's national magazines are edited, printed and distributed to the provinces. The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and in particular the southern neighbourhood of Barracas where Editorial Perfil built its multimedia headquarters, has been the operational home of the magazine throughout its existence. Yet its own sales history shows that its cultural footprint was always national and even regional, with the majority of its first-decade copies sold outside the capital and a leading position in Uruguay. That combination, edited in Buenos Aires but read across the country and beyond, is characteristic of the Argentine magazine industry at its height, and Semanario remains one of its clearest examples.

Current status

Semanario today is a current Editorial Perfil title, relaunched in 2020 and categorised by its publisher as an entertainment magazine. Its long record, from the newsprint tabloid-style weekly of 1979 with its hundred family articles, through the celebrity-focused formula of the 1990s and 2000s, to its present print and digital incarnation, makes it a useful lens on the whole modern history of Argentine popular magazines. Verified details of its day-to-day current circulation are not published in the sources consulted, so no figure is claimed here. What is documented is the arc itself: founded in November 1979, Perfil's first great success, imitated across the market, closed after thirty-seven years, and brought back in June 2020, a weekly that has already outlived most of the publications that once copied it.