Revista Semana
31 July 2010 front cover of issue 1474 of Semana featuring President Álvaro Uribe.
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| Director | Alejandro Santos Rubino |
|---|---|
| Editor-in-Chief | Álvaro Sierra Restrepo |
| Managing Editor | Luz María Sierra Lopera |
| Categories | News magazine |
| Frequency | Weekly |
| Founder | Alberto Lleras Camargo |
| First issue | 1946 |
| Company | Publicaciones Semana S.A |
| Country | Colombia |
| Based in | Bogotá, D.C. |
| Language | Spanish |
| Website | www |
| ISSN | 0124-5473 |
| OCLC number | 7475329 |
Semana (Spanish: Week) is a weekly magazine of opinion and analysis in Colombia.
Semana was founded in 1946 by Alberto Lleras Camargo (who would become president of Colombia in 1958) and that folded in 1961. It was relaunched by journalist Felipe López Caballero in 1983.
Born in 1947, he attended the Liceo Frances in Bogota, lived in Boston, graduated from Nueva Granada Military College in Bogota, lived in Germany, attended the London School of Economics, earned an MBA in Switzerland, and worked in London for the Federation of Coffee Growers. He was 35 years old when he decided to start a magazine in 1982, and he took two earlier Colombian magazines as models. One was Alberto Lleras Camargo's Semana; the other was Alternativa, a left-wing weekly published by Enrique Santos and Gabriel García Márquez. The foreign magazines that he strove to imitate were Time and Newsweek.
Recalling the prestige that had been enjoyed by Lleras's magazine, López asked for, and was given, permission to use the same name. López set up shop in a shabby set of offices, purchased used desks and typewriters from Alternativa, and set about developing “the first publication of independent journalism in the country's history.” His first issue came out on 12 May 12 1982. Its cover story was about terrorism. Since then it has continued, according to the above-cited profile of López, to be “a bastion of critical, rigorous journalism.”
During the 1980s and 80s, Publicaciones Semana grew immensely. Over time, López came to be compared to Charles Foster Kane, the newspaper magnate who is the protagonist of the American film Citizen Kane. The author of the profile of López suggested that the key to Semana's success could be expressed in one word: “independence.” Cecilia Orozco, a member of the Colombian government who is a friend of López's, has said that “he would love to have a pro-government magazine” but knows that it is important for Semana to maintain its independence.
Some of Semana's most important reporting has been about Pablo Escobar, the drug trafficking kingpin. In the 1980s, López was one of the two “big whistleblowers and critics” of drug trafficking. Since then, however, the magazine has become less exclusively political.
The profile of López notes that when he travels, he “doesn't leave the hotel until lunchtime. He spends his morning thinking about the next issue of Semana....His room looks like an editorial office, with plates of food and magazines on the floor. The guy can't stay quiet. He doesn't sit down, watches five TV channels at once, reads three article at a time.”
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