activity than one that permanently allows you to ask all the questions you like, investigate all the subjects you find fascinating, meet and work with such intelligent and creative people and, above all, be able to influence not only the way your audiences see the world, but also to contribute to their leading better lives and even to accelerating the development of one’s country.
VEJA, the only newsweekly in the world to have the largest circulation in the country. How do you explain that? Are there lessons to be taken from other titles to succeed in the contemporary media environment?
RC: In 1967, I persuaded my father to let After that, my father persuaded me to
come back to Brazil to work with him at Abril, which at the time published only Disney comics and ‘fotonovelas’. So I’ve had the glorious opportunity of dedicating the last fifty years or so to creating and developing all the magazines that I was inspired by or occasionally just imagined.
As to why the passion, I can think of no more fascinating, rewarding and enjoyable
me try to create a weekly magazine inspired by Time, and a year later we launched VEJA just three months before Brazil’s military dictatorship imposed what turned out to be nearly a decade of censorship of all local media. Not at all great timing. Because of this and because Brazil’s readers were not accustomed to reading magazines with more text than photos, it took us some seven years to reach break-even point. In the process, we made VEJA more visually attractive without sacrificing any of its content and simultaneously persuaded Brazil’s newsstand owners to allow us to sell what were until then forbidden subscriptions. Simultaneously, VEJA developed both a formula that went well beyond weekly news as well as an independent and courageous voice that, over the following decades, became the voice of nearly everyone who wanted freedom, democracy, free enterprise, honest and efficient government and the economic and social development of Brazil. In the process, the magazine grew to have over one million subscribers and some 200,000 newsstand buyers per week. (All this at full price, for I had long since concluded that the US pricing of subscriptions was a recipe for future disaster…)