A Success Story From Santiago: A Q&A With El Semanal’s Iván Weissman

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Iván Weissman is a Chilean-American journalist, economist, and political scientist who is based in Argentina. Two years ago, he launched “El Semanal” (The Weekly), out of his urge to find a platform to participate in the political and economic debate that exploded in Chile following the social outbreak of October 2019. The newsletter now has 20,000 subscribers and quickly became a profitable new source of income for El Mostrador, the country’s leading digital media group, under which El Semanal was launched.

Weissman talked to Inbox Collective’s Alex Hazlett about launching his newsletter under a parent company, his connections to Chile, and his expansion plans for El Semanal.

Can you describe El Semanal in a few sentences? 

El Semanal is a newsletter that combines scoops, analysis, opinion and a bit of gossip, in covering the world of business, economy, finance and power in Chile. The Chilean business circles are conservative, are full of conflicts of interests and take themselves way too seriously. El Semanal is my attempt at exposing that with a bit of humor and in the process do some good journalism. 

Did you have a personal connection to Chile? 

Born in the United States to Chilean parents, I only put a foot in Chile for the first time when my parents separated, and we moved to Santiago to live with my grandparents when I was 2. I spent the next 15 years in Chile, but frequently visited New York and Los Angeles, where my dad lived. Before I turned 18, I had moved back to the US to go to college. Little did I know that, except for some visits to my mother and sisters, I would not come back for 27 years, and only briefly. In 2017, I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I had moved to Argentina as a partner in a media startup and was busy and happy trying to make it work. And then, in October of 2019, Chile exploded, politically speaking. 

What happened in 2019?

A student protest that started as a complaint against the rise in the cost of public transport got out of control. For a few weeks, there were riots on the streets and thousands took to the streets against the government in marches that often turned violent. And it was all happening in my old neighborhood, which had become ground zero for the protests. I saw mobs trying to storm my old apartment building live on television, churches burning to the ground and the country literally on the verge of a civil war. 

And during those weeks, during which the tensions put Chile’s democracy at stake, I felt a level of sadness, anxiety and passion about what I was witnessing that I had never felt before. I thought of my immigrant family that had made Chile home, the friends I had made as a kid and it dawned on me that I was “un chileño” at heart after all. And that I cared deeply about this country and its people. The question then arose: “What can I do about it?”

The social outburst sparked a conversation in the country, sometimes loud and violent, and made me want to be a part of that conversation, thinking I could make a contribution. I have a progressive/technocratic outlook and I hate extremes, and I saw that the extremes were dominating the debate. 

That is how I came up with the idea of launching El Semanal, my newsletter project. In 2012, when I went back to Chile, I joined El Mostrador, Chile’s leading political news site and launched El Mostrador Mercados, a sister publication that covered business and economics, and El Mostrador TV, its television operation. Right about the time of the riots, Federico Joannon, the publisher and managing director of El Mostrador, had been asking me about writing a column or doing a monthly piece. Even from Buenos Aires, I still had good sources in Chile, access to good information, and plenty of opinions. My counteroffer to him was to do the newsletter.

Why did you want to start a newsletter?

I had become a huge fan of Axios and its successful newsletter products, and I thought it could work in Chile. At El Mostrador, we have always been more interested in who reads us than in how many clicks we get, and El Semanal´s target audience was people with some measure of power and influence. Chile is Latin America’s richest economy on a per-capita basis, and I had a sense that not only El Semanal would be successful editorially but also as a business proposition. Chile´s media ecosystem was changing fast, and I thought there was demand for the editorial project I had in mind: news, analysis and opinion about money, people, and power. The idea was to build a community around those topics under the brand of El Semanal, and monetize it.

When did it launch and what kind of growth did you see? 

The first edition of El Semanal was launched on July 26, 2020. In six months, I had about 10,000 subscribers and an open rate of 43%, which has remained consistent to this day. The Sunday premium version has an open rate of 78%. 

Currently, the newsletter has almost 20,000 subscribers, a really significant number for a country with 17.5 million inhabitants. The premium version was launched a year ago, and it currently has 1,489 paid subscribers who can choose an annual or monthly plan. (An annual subscription costs the equivalent of about $68 USD.) Every Sunday, those premium subscribers receive the newsletter in their mailbox. In a simple and direct way, they inform themselves about the news of power and money. 

From Axios, I chose to copy the short, to-the-point style of telling the news and delivering my analysis. I tend to express myself in bullet points when writing articles anyway. That style of titles, short paragraphs, and direct sentences suits me. Without a doubt, the focus was to make it easy to read on a mobile phone and facilitate the user experience.

Are there other events or opportunities surrounding the newsletter? 

We have created a community around El Semanal with which I interact: I answer their questions and invite them to participate in El Semanal workshops and seminars, which are at no additional cost to paid subscribers. 

This year I launched “El Semanal Exprés,” a shorter, midweek edition that is sent early on Thursday mornings to paid subscribers. An edited version is sent to the wider community mid-morning. That version is edited again and published on Monday and Thursdays afternoons on the El Mostrador site. The idea is that part of the information is open to a massive audience such as that of El Mostrador, but also part remains closed to encourage readers to become subscribers and eventually also paid subscribers.

What’s the relationship between El Semanal and El Mostrador? 

Before our partnership El Mostrador only had a morning newsletter that was used as a platform to bring clicks to the news site with links to the most relevant news of the day. El Mostrador, which has an average of 5 million monthly unique visitors and a business model based mainly on advertising, used the partnership as a way to test the waters of paid content. So far the newsletter is the only paid content El Mostrador offers. 

From an editorial point of view, El Semanal is helping El Mostrador expand its audience to a business audience. Politics and power had always been at the core of what it did, but the world of business/markets/investment/economy was not at the heart of the editorial line. I come from that world and have always believed that business and money have an excessive influence in politics and even more so in Chile. El Semanal aims to make those links and influence transparent.

What’s your production process like for El Semanal?

I currently spend half the time in Chile and the rest I live in Argentina, where my family is, going back and forth roughly every other week. When in Buenos Aires, I organize myself to report and find out about Chile during the week, and I am pretty structured. The pandemic meant it wasn’t necessary for me to be physically present to collect information or talk with sources. 

Usually on Sundays, I spend four hours putting together and writing the edition. I use graphics, GIFs, sometimes photos, and I make sure the paragraphs are short, with one idea per paragraph.

What have you learned about your audience? 

We’ve done some surveys through Google Forms and other types of analysis using Google tools, MailChimp (the ESP we use), and doing a study of subscribers, based on their names and IP addresses. The audience is almost 60% men over 35 years old, 75% have a university degree, and 51% have completed postgraduate studies. In contrast, El Mostrador’s audience skews younger overall and has a more even balance of men and women.

This year, we will add a product manager to our team, and our goal is to refine the data we have about our community. Analyzing it is one of our priorities this year, in order to help us improve our content, design, and user experience.

How does El Semanal make money? 

El Semanal has three sources of income: paid subscribers, sponsorships with paid content that complement the editorial content (again, I copy the Axios model); and workshops/events, which also have sponsors. 

I organize monthly workshops and live events, such as interviews, where the community participates and I, together with a guest, answer their questions. These activities are about topics related to the content that I cover in the newsletter. For example, the ABCs of finance, financial inclusion, tax issues, investments, among others. We also offer seminars with invited experts, economists, ministers, and members of the cabinet.

Has it met your goals? Do you consider it a success? 

El Semanal has been a success almost from the beginning. This year, with El Mostrador, but using the platform I built, we launched two more newsletters. One that focuses on startups, personal finance, and millennials and their relationship with money, and another that focuses on the intersection of culture, technology and science.

The idea actually arose from the success of El Semanal and the response we had from companies and the audience. The idea is to develop a model similar to Substack’s and adapt it to our reality and objectives.

For El Mostrador, the newsletter platform is a new tool to generate loyalty, engagement, and financing. We plan to eventually have seven verticals, one per day, always around economic/business/finance/technology and corporate themes. We also plan to launch workshops and seminars around those new products.

What are some of the challenges you’ve dealt with? 

I think newsletters can only be successful if they become indispensable, otherwise they are just a commodity. And for them to be indispensable to their audience, the product has to have a very distinctive voice and a personality, so it’s important to find authoritative voices that can command a following. 

I had experience covering and analyzing financial, economic and political issues and a profile in Chile when I joined El Mostrador in 2011 following 12 years leading the business of Bloomberg TV in London, between 1999 and 2011. This made it easier to launch a newsletter around my expertise than it would have been otherwise. 

Navigating the gray area of advertising, sponsorship, and editorial can also be a challenge. I have to be very careful because my journalism is aggressive and challenges the powerful. I am very disciplined, try to be very clear and transparent, but that hasn’t kept me from some uncomfortable situations. To my advantage, I have a pretty well known voice and position on most issues and it would be quite obvious if I started pulling my punches, so to speak.

Subscription growth is an ongoing challenge. In October, the paid edition will be celebrating its first anniversary. Only about 1.5 percent of the regular readers of the open edition have become paid subscribers. We want to get to five percent by the time El Semanal turns two.

We also have some editorial challenges, especially connecting with the younger generations that are not so interested in power, people, and money. Launching the other newsletters is part of our strategy to appeal to them, but finding the right person to write those newsletters is key. The product has to quickly become indispensable to its audience for it to be editorially and commercially successful. And for that you need someone who has an original voice and something interesting and different to say.  

Iván Weissman is currently Editor at Large at El Mostrador and author of El Semanal de El Mostrador, a bi-weekly newsletter about economics, business and politics.

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