April is out!

The test of any magazine is not usually timeliness (otherwise, good lord, why read it?) or even relevance (ditto) but the evenness of the publication cover-to-cover. April, in that sense, was amazing. I know most of you, particularly the correspondents, focus on your own story once it is in print and perhaps leaf through the rest, like any reader would. Sit in my seat for a year or so, and you see it differently. The whole thing matters, and it hurts when even a small item is less than it could have been.

No such problem in April. Mexico Correspondent Marisol Rueda and Brazil Correspondent Margarida Pfeifer ran their legs off doing our Hot 50 run on small and medium-sized companies. Pfeifer was simultaneously pulling together an excellent Brazil outlook, full of top sources, a pleasure to edit and see in layout, and filing on drug giant Eli Lilly in Brazil. (Rueda was busy as hell, too, but on a May issue monster, more on that later.)

Usually, if the feature well is strong -- and sometimes that does not happen -- then we are okay. But Rueda and Luciano Somenzari tackled the arrival of search giant Google, while longtime Latin Trader Mery Galanternick hit the phenonenon that is Orkut in Brazil. Darcy Crowe in Bogota filed a nice, strong story on Colombian pharmacies facing a consolidation. Rueda filed a tourism hit from Margarita Island off the Venezuelan coast (she is everywhere!), while News Editor Forrest Jones turned an ad in the back of airline magazine into a surprising, fresh piece on how gazillionaires do time-share.

So far so good, we could probably have published whatever else we had and moved on, but no, Spanish Editor Andrés F. Velázuez filed twice in Radar, on video ads on buses and a Q&A with the new head of the IDB. He also wrote a great read on a Colombian software collective and its more-than-a-little charismatic leader.

Mike Ceaser chimed in on the surprising economics of small coca farming. Rueda returned with coverage of the impending Panama Canal project, while Juan Pedro Tomas hit the recovery of Argentine shipyards.

Creative Director Bryan Cooper came up with an excellent cover, and I know it seems easy, a picture of a matchhead, but it is not (click here, scroll up). The feature layouts and design were strong. The research was interesting and very supportive of the stories, thanks to Research Director Gabriela Calderon. Every story was complete and a good read, and it was like the magazine came to life in your hands. Thanks, everyone, for making that happen.