• Etiqueta Negra, Vol. 5, No. 38, July 2006, Lima

In recent years, journalism has suffered from two vices: an obsession with the superficial and a growing frivolity. Latin America is no exception. The region’s newsstands are dominated by Spanish aristocracy-obsessed society magazines, such as the ubiquitous ¡Hola!, and American-style celebrity glossies.

COURTESY: ETIQUETA NEGRA

Latin American newsstands weren’t historically overrun with fluff. During the 1930s, a great generation of Argentine writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, gave birth to the journal Sur. Mexican poet Octavio Paz recovered the tradition in order to found the literary magazines Plural and Vuelta, both seminal publications of the Spanish-speaking cultural world of the late 20th century. All of these magazines share the same vocation and structure; each of them wed creativity and serious reflection. They are magazines in the original sense of the word: genuine warehouses in which nearly all manifestations of thought comfortably reside.

Perhaps mindful of this tradition, Latin American journalism has long failed to give its readers a publication capable of mixing trivial topics with long-form, elegant, and reflective texts and smart nonfiction writing. Instead, the Latin American continent has been presented to the world through fantasy, with millions of readers coming to know the region thanks to the imagination of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. Recently, however, a segment of the region’s journalistic ranks has rebelled against the magical realist aesthetic. For these authors, a...