My content strategist, editor and writer portfolio is up.

I’m working with tech, financial and other companies in specific brand content projects.

Visit that page here.

I arrived in Santa Cruz, Calif., in August 2015, fresh off an incredible couple of years as editor-in-chief of Mexico’s leading business magazine, Expansión.

The move was a family decision, which I explain at length in this post in Spanish. But basically what happened was my American wife had finished her Ph.D. and was ready to move her career forward in the U.S. So we decided to leave Mexico after seven years—and two chilanga daughters.

It was something we talked about and planned for years, so I knew the moment to quit my awesome job would finally arrive at some point.

Since arriving here, I’ve been freelancing as a consultant and editing coach for Expansión, which helped me stay in touch with some of the talented journalists whom I helped bring into the team. And I’ve started writing with some frequency again—which is fun—, covering the global revolution that is happening right in front of my eyes in Silicon Valley. I couldn’t have landed in a more relevant place at a more interesting time.

Every time I do an interview, cover a conference or meet with new sources and acquaintances, I marvel at the enormous amount of stories taking place here amidst a technology revolution with deep social, economic, even political, impact. There is an abundance of source material for me to stay very busy as a writer and multimedia producer.

I intend to cover Silicon Valley from the business angle but also the social and policy ones. Like the people at Quartz, I have my own obsessions: Income inequality, diversity in tech, business disruption and innovation, and of course Latin American trailblazers in Silicon Valley. As usual, you can follow me on Twitter and tumblr to hear more about this as it happens.

I have worked as an editor in magazines and newspapers, on the web, and on a wire service desk. I have edited in both Spanish and English.

Most recently, I was the editor-in-chief at Mexico’s leading business magazine, Expansión. (More about why I left that job, here.)

Being able to lead an influential and well-regarded publication was a great experience, the type of job many journalists dream of when getting started in the profession.

As deputy editor (2012-­2013) and editor-­in-­chief (2013-­2015) at Expansión, I helped a talented team of editors, photographers and designers innovate with disruptive covers and new products in a quite conservative business news segment; refresh the mag’s longstanding rankings and special issues; put more women on the cover in a ‘macho’ business culture; incorporate narrative journalism into a ‘traditional’ magazine; and I questioned the political status quo and pushed the business community to effect change in Mexican society from the cover and the editorial page.

The Ascent and Downfall of Nextel

Supervising a 20-person editorial team, I quickly learned that my main task was to attract and develop talent that could help elevate the magazine’s journalistic standards. I pushed this young and ambitious team to measure up against international brands, not just domestic competitors.

They produced hard-hitting investigations and innovative editorial products—and Expansión stood out amongst its competitors, as when we published an expose on a corporate culture gone wild at telecoms company Nextel (pictured.)

During my time at Expansión, I launched an annual English-language edition and the mag’s first-ever digital-only issue. I helped plan an integrated newsroom serving several magazines and websites, and wrote the newsroom’s first-ever Manual of Style.

My job also involved representing the brand at public events and media appearances.

At The Associated Press between 2009 and 2012, I edited dozens of stories per shift –sometimes about 50– on the World Spanish Desk, filing bulletins, urgents and spot stories as well as features and analytical pieces. My duties included preparing daily digests, collaborating with editors in other sections and the English-language service and editing captions. The desk handled all sections, including entertainment, sports, business and science — so I edited all of those.

As a managing editor at Gatopardo, I was in charge of guiding every issue of the monthly magazine from start to finish. I edited front-end sections and in-depth narrative features and coordinated all aspects of production with the photo, art and commercial departments.

At Feet in Two Worlds, I worked with a far-flung team of foreign-born contributors who wrote about immigration in the U.S. from Phoenix, New York, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles and elsewhere. I edited text, photos, audio and video to maximize their impact potential on the web. On November 2008, I edited the site’s Election Day coverage, which included radio appearances, text reports, audio soundbites, videos and pictures from across the country as Americans took part in a historical vote.

I also collaborated with the investigative journalism outfit Fundación MEPI in editing an article resulting from a months-long study that measured how Mexican regional media have resorted to self-censorship on the face of increasing drug violence in their cities. The story –which we produced in Spanish and English– was published in leading newspaper El Universal, and was picked up by CNN Mexico and Proceso magazine, and American media such as ProPublica and NPR’s On the Media.

My first job as an editor was actually at my first job. At my hometown newspaper El Territorio, I went in a year from intern to editor in charge of Page 2, which featured several small sections including a column I wrote, reader feedback, person-on-the-street Q&A’s and infographics.

I entered the newsroom at El Territorio, then the oldest and biggest paper in the province, to start an internship that was my first job in the industry. Although it now seems a momentous ocassion, I actually spent the afternoon sitting on a desk, looking at people work, after the assignment editor apologized for having no clue about what he was supposed to do with me.

These were still Ye Old Tymes: it was on El Territorio‘s computers that I created my first email account and it was on its pages that I experienced the now old-style thrill of looking up your bylined story and re-reading every single word to then complain about the editor who’d destroyed your prose.

Coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election on the NY Daily News.

After that start at a provincial newspaper with a circulation of about 15,000, I soon moved on to Buenos Aires and the national market. I covered crime stories for Clarín, the biggest newspaper in Argentina and then the one with the highest circulation in the Spanish-speaking world.

After Columbia J-School, I learned the American style of newspaper journalism and a whole lot about Northern New Jersey, working as a beat reporter covering the post-industrial city of Elizabeth for The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Later on, I became a steady contributor for the Daily News of New York, where I wrote features and spot news for Viva New York, a monthly section in the newspaper, and for Hora Hispana, a Spanish-language newsweekly.

Here are some of my newspaper articles, from my first feature ever –a study of the relationship between teenagers and cops in Posadas– to New York arts and culture coverage for the Daily News and a story from the side of a railroad track in Mexico for The Star-Ledger.

	› Latino life, arts and culture for “New York’s hometown newspaper,” 2004-2008.
	› Work as a beat reporter in the leading newspaper in New Jersey, 2003-2004.
	› A newsweekly in Spanish published by the Daily News (NY), 2004-2008.
	› The crime beat and other stories in Buenos Aires, 1998-1999.
	› Stories as a New York correspondent for Texas newspapers, 2006.
	› My first job ever as a journalist, in Posadas, Argentina, 1997-2000.

Starting October 2013, I am the new editor in chief at Expansión magazine. After a year and a half as the deputy editor, I succeeded Adolfo Ortega in this position.

My appointment comes after three months of leading the magazine since Adolfo’s departure. In this period we launched Expansión‘s first English-language edition, and we made some waves with an interview with English billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson.

This is the first time I’m the top editor in a publication, it’s the sort of opportunity a journalist covets for a lifetime.

Here’s my first year at Expansión, told through the mag’s cover.

]]> https://www.diegograglia.net/old-site/a-year-in-covers/feed/ 0 https://www.diegograglia.net/old-site/new-beat-new-job/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-beat-new-job https://www.diegograglia.net/old-site/new-beat-new-job/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 02:09:27 +0000 DG http://www.diegograglia.net/?p=4445 May 2012

After three years at the AP’s Latin American desk, I recently left the news cooperative to become the managing editor at Mexico’s leading business magazine, Expansión.

Born 43 years ago, Expansión underwent a major redesign at the start of 2012, both in visual and conceptual terms.

The team I help lead is charged with taking the mag into a new multiplatform era while upholding its longtime reputation for serious and thorough journalism.

In October, I spent 20 days in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, working on The A.P.’s coverage of the PanAmerican Games.

In addition to editing hundreds and hundreds of news stories and results tables every day for about 10 to 12 hours –and then writing some–, I also worked on a series of audio slideshows with the goal of enhancing our PanAm package with multimedia content.

It was offered to A.P. clients as part of the coverage, and many ran it on their websites.

Here are the three slideshows produced in this occasion:

Introduction by former world’s No. 1 golfer Lorena Ochoa

Rugby in Mexico:

Basque Pelota:

I used many plugins, but the one that was absolutely key was WPML Multilingual CMS. Without it, I don’t know how I would have managed to make this whole thing bilingual and have the Spanish and the English sides mirror each other so neatly. (I got WPML when it was a free plugin, which it no longer is.)

Other plugins:

- WP Audio Player, which lets me showcase my radio and podcast work.

- BNS Add Widget, which lets me display the link menus you see in the footer.

- Category Page, which helped me create the Archive pages for each media outlet I’ve worked for, listing the corresponding stories very neatly, like here.

- Just One Category, which tells WordPress to display on a category archive page only those posts which are direct members of that category. Helps keep the above-mentioned pages neatly ordered.

- Single Post Template, which I used to create the breadcrumb navigation. Had to create a lot of templates, though, but that’s due to the complex organization of the site’s categories.

- Social Media Widget, which displays the nice little logos for finding me on Twitter, LinkedIn, rss and email, both on the home page and the inside pages.

- Top Level Categories, which removes the prefix from the URL for a category, so that urls are way simpler. That way, you get diegograglia.net/newspapers instead of diegograglia.net/categories/newspapers.

- Tumblrize, which I used to move my old WordPress.com blog to a Tumblr installation at blog.diegograglia.net. I had to manually “Update” every single post, but it was the easiest way I found to import from WordPress to Tumblr.

I also received help from the WordPress community forums and assorted blogs, where I found some answers to my ignorance about php. The rest, I figured out by trial and error. I’m glad it (mostly) worked.