The Argentina team immediately swung into action when reports hit that former One Direction star Liam Payne died after falling from a third-floor Buenos Aires balcony. Colleagues across three continents jumped in as the story grew, cooperation that shows the best of AP’s global footprint and enabled a robust, creative report that dominated all metrics for multiple days.
Debora Rey and Isabel DeBre in Argentina worked with entertainment colleagues Malika Sen and Kaitlyn Huamani to generate well-sourced alerts and detailed updates, while senior video producer Victor Caivano pivoted from coverage of a volatile protest to establish a live shot 25 minutes before our competition.
News director and chief photographer Natacha Pisarenko, Caivano and freelance video journalist Cristian Kovadlof followed every development on the ground from the moment the news broke.
The AP was also the first English-language media outlet to obtain a recording of the 911 call from the hotel just minutes before Payne’s death.
In New York, Sen brought together global colleagues while Huamani reached out to entertainment sources and providing background. Her Things to Know story the next day got more than 120,000 pageviews on its own.
Writer Almudena Calatrava worked security sources to inform visual colleagues and produce a main bar of major developments, while Jill Lawless in London and Music Writer Maria Sherman both produced stories that put One Direction in context.
The teamwork kept AP ahead on all aspects of one of the world’s most closely watched stories.
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