Gatopardo magazine achieved a first when it won two of the five categories – text and photography – at the Gabo Awards in July.
The long-form crónica – with a plot that is part equine rescue and part true crime – was written by Argentine journalist Diego Fernández Romeral and photographed by Anita Pouchard Serra.
The narrative story and arresting visuals are illustrative of the kind of journalism Gatopardo is known for and where the magazine itself is investing for the future.
Gatopardo has managed to remain a strong promoter of narrative journalism in Latin America, where there are fewer and fewer editorial spaces that allow for the financing and publication of long-form features that take considerable time to produce. Print media circulation in the region fell 16.3 percent in 2020, and a 2.7 percent drop was forecast for 2024.
“La noche de los caballos: el rescate equino más grande de América del Sur” de Anita Pouchard Serra (@OjosdeAnita) y Diego Fernández Romeral ganó en la categoría de Texto en el #PremioGabo (@FundacionGabo) 2024.
¡Felicidades! https://t.co/KlztKlAtvg
— Gatopardo (@Gatopardocom) July 6, 2024
“At the regional level I think there are no longer spaces that can be sustained, that allow you to write a crónica that’s 60,000 characters,” Fernández Romeral told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). He mentioned that other similar magazines in Latin America, such as Etiqueta Negra, from Peru, have closed, while others continue on, but not with the impact of Gatopardo.
“There are people who are still very interested in that type of journalism, but I don't know how that could be channeled into profits for a company,” he added.
Gatopardo wants to challenge this trend. In 2020, it began a process of reinvention in order to continue producing quality narrative journalism and at the same time look for ways to guarantee financial sustainability.
Four years later, the magazine has made decisions that have produced positive results: diversifying its sources of income, remaining a niche media outlet, reconceptualizing the magazine as a collector's product and consolidating a loyal community of readers.
Looking ahead to its 25th anniversary, which will be celebrated next year, Gatopardo is in a brand repositioning process, which includes redesigning its website and strategies to attract younger readers. With this, the magazine aims to set the tone for the coming years.
After Gatopardo was acquired by Mexican investment firm Acacia Capital in 2020, the new owners introduced a mentality to the magazine's newsroom focused on prioritizing business decisions at the same level as editorial ones.
“Both the president and vice president of Gatopardo have a financial background. So from there the view is different. And like good businessmen, they know that sustainability is very important,” Diana Amador, editorial coordinator of the magazine, told LJR. “I coordinate the team and make decisions, and I also had to internalize the sustainability part in my own head. It was not easy at all, because as a journalist, no one teaches you finances, they teach you journalism.”
The first change of the new administration, at the end of 2020, was to change the frequency of the print magazine from monthly to quarterly. Then came a reconceptualization to turn the publication into a collector's item with features that gave it added value, such as higher quality paper, luxury design and a preponderance of photographs.
In editorial terms, the quality requirement also increased. Content curation became stricter, with a priority focused on creating “extraordinary features with extraordinary authors and great photographs,” Amador said.
“Now we are always thinking about how to do that treasured and transcendent journalism that makes you keep a physical object for a long time,” she said. “When a printed magazine becomes a collector’s item, it can be marketed in a different way.”
The diversification of its income played a fundamental role in Gatopardo's new life. Currently, Amador said the magazine is financed mainly through the sale of paid content, the publishing of books for organizations and public institutions, and the contribution of funding partners that sponsor specific projects. Although recently the production of audiovisual content for companies has become Gatopardo’s main source of income.
After a change in Gatopardo's management, the magazine was reconceptualized as a collector's item with higher quality paper, luxury design and a preponderance of photographs. (Photo: Courtesy of Gatopardo)
Amador attributes the success of this business model to the fact that the commercial products they produce have the same quality as the magazine's content in terms of narrative, authors and design. But, above all, because, although income has increased, the magazine has resisted the temptation to try to grow its number of team members or expand to other audiences.
The current newsroom in Mexico City consists of 15 people, including a journalist dedicated to writing long-form features and two researchers who create shorter articles and content for social networks. However, the editors themselves also write their own articles.
It is the network of external collaborators that Gatopardo has throughout Latin America that does the bulk of the long-form reporting, Amador said.
“Media receive this financial aid and what they immediately do is grow, that is, hire people. That doesn't work because you open another hole for money,” Amador said. “We decided that no, that we are a niche media outlet and we are not going to be expanding because it does not make sense. It is not only an editorial decision, but also a financial one.”
Under that logic, all Gatopardo projects are subject to a budget established at the beginning of the year, which is very strictly controlled, Amador said. At the editorial level, this control impacts the editors' criteria for selecting the features that are produced, so that quality is guaranteed without threatening the sustainability of the media outlet.
“You are not used to being told 'you can't do this because you can't spend.’ But in the end it also works for me because it is one more filter to approve a story. It's asking yourself, 'Is this story worth taking 20 percent of my budget?'" she said.
Gatopardo is about to extend the visual transformation of its printed product to its digital version. The launch of a redesigned version of its website is scheduled for September 2024, Amador said. It’s part of a rebranding campaign that seeks to reposition the magazine as it marks its 25th anniversary.
Also next year the magazine plans to launch a subscription program that will offer a personalized browsing experience on its new website, while access to content will remain free for everyone, Amador said.
“Achieving financial sustainability has been challenging, as it is for everyone in this industry, but our goal isn’t to turn Gatopardo into a highly profitable business; rather, it’s to ensure the longevity of a media outlet, maintaining the quality and our values to serve the society as a place to understand us better in a polarized and changing region and world,” Alejandro Legorreta, president of Gatopardo and Acacia Capital, told LJR.
The Gatopardo team is aware that having a strong community of readers is a fundamental factor for sustainability of the media outlet. Although they know that the magazine is not a mass media outlet and they do not intend to expand to other audiences, they are interested in growing their niche audience of people who like narrative journalism, especially younger generations.
That is why an important part of Gatopardo's strategy is focused on its digital platforms. Amador said that this year they redoubled their efforts on Instagram and TikTok to engage Generation Z.
Gatopardo's Instagram strategy includes the publication of spectacular images that accompany its reports, or even photo essays not linked to written content. In addition, the audience team aims to publish social media copy that conveys enough information in itself, but that at the same time invites the reader to visit the website.
"Not only do I have to look for the 'like', I also have to offer you information, you have to leave with some information," Mariano Mangas, Gatopardo's audience editor, told LJR. “Planning is done so that when the user enters Instagram or TikTok, they not only take with them a beautiful image or a well-crafted design, but they also take away some data, some knowledge, or something that adds value, so that the copy leaves you with a feeling of 'I want to read more.'"
On TikTok, Gatopardo publishes videos of the community manager and youngest reporter in the newsroom talking about relevant topics or explaining the magazine's features with small clues about what they address.
By the metrics, these strategies are working. According to Mangas, in the last semester the magazine saw a 200 percent increase in its number of followers on Instagram, in addition to its publications going from having between 30 and 50 interactions in 2023 to a range of 500 to 1,000 this year. Also, their numbers indicate that about 30 percent of the traffic on Gatopardo's website comes from Instagram specifically.
This year, Gatopardo redoubled its efforts on Instagram and TikTok to try to engage the Gen Z audience. (Photo: Screenshot of Gatopardo's TikTok)
For its new website, the outlet turned to user experience experts to make sure readers could more easily consume the long-form stories that make Gatopardo special. Some of these features, like “The Night of the Horses,” are 10,000 words long and take more than 40 minutes to read.
Amador explained that the new site will incorporate multimedia journalism in which large-format photographs play a predominant role and in which the stories are accompanied by content in other formats, such as videos, audios or graphics.
To redesign its site, Gatopardo conducted a survey among its newsletter subscribers that gave them a clear idea of what their audience likes and what they don't. In addition, they have invited some of their readers to participate in tests of the new website and to give content suggestions.
Amador said that readers will be an important part in the new stage of the magazine, since they will participate as “another editor,” with constant interaction with the newsroom. They even plan to open a physical meeting space in 2025 that will be open to the public for events and conversations.
“Our next bet both now for the launch of the site and for what is to come is to listen to the audience,” Amador said. “We have done different things to strengthen a community because that is the only thing that can sustain a media outlet.”
Another important piece of Gatopardo’s future involves the development of new voices to write the next generation of narrative journalism.
Throughout its history, a range of highly regarded authors have written in the pages of Gatopardo, including Mexicans Carlos Fuentes and Lydia Cacho, Colombian Felipe Restrepo, and Argentinians Martín Caparrós and Leila Guerriero. The latter is currently the magazine's Latin American editor.
Yet, for three years Gatopardo has carried out various efforts to find and promote local voices and thus promote fairer and more inclusive journalistic coverage of remote regions of Latin America.
“For decades, the work of local journalists has been largely invisible and there is a conscious, deliberate and very cynical extractivism on the part of many journalists to go to the states, extract the information and return to the city,” Amador said. “I think these practices have a lot to do with the violence suffered by [local] journalists. This idea that the great cronistas are only in Mexico City, they came from private schools and studied literature is not true.”
The magazine has launched an initiative in the Caribbean and another in the Yucatan Peninsula to help journalists and photographers from those regions produce stories about their communities. In the latter case, those selected received training and monitoring by Gatopardo editors, and some of them have continued publishing reports in the magazine.
¿Eres periodista en Yucatán y tienes una gran historia que contar? Súmate a Relatos Peninsulares y aprende de Daniela Rea y Eliezer Budasoff sobre periodismo narrativo y sonoro.
Conoce más e inscríbete en https://t.co/zcALJPR6Wp pic.twitter.com/ppEe2P1287
— Gatopardo (@Gatopardocom) August 16, 2023
“Narrative journalism is not something you just do as a natural talent, but you work a little with them, and when they have the talent, they come out ahead,” Amador said. “If you bet much more on this young talent and this much fresher look, you will find stories that you will never see because you are in Mexico City.”
Amador said that this year they plan to repeat the experience and in the future extend it to other regions of Mexico. This is so that stories from both established Latin American authors and new local journalists can coexist in the same space.
“Narrative journalism at some point became very elite, let's say, inaccessible,” Amador said. “It seemed like the list of reporters capable of doing this work was very small and that you always had to work with them, but it is also good for us to hear other voices. We know that they are out there and that we just have to do this job of going and looking for them.”
Teresa Mioli collaborated in the reporting of this article
