The AP was the sole outlet inside Cissy Houston’s memorial service due to its longstanding relationship with a representative for the Houston family, prior coverage of major celebrity memorial, including Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin, and the broad distribution of AP’s obituary on the gospel legend.
AP worked closely with the representative to explain how we would cover the event, with Jonathan Landrum, Hillel Italie, Brooke Lefferts, Ali Kaufman and Anthony McCartney outlining our coverage. Prior experience with covering Whitney Houston’s memorial in the same church was helpful. AP’s strong position was laid when the representative entrusted Landrum to break news of Cissy Houston’s death, which received more than 125,000 page views and was widely distributed. The obituary story was written by Landrum and Hillel Italie. Italie drew on prior coverage of memorials to convince the representative to allow him to cover the service. A last-minute emergency led to Mark Kennedy stepping in to handle the text story.
Hamilton and Neira covered the service for video, while Ali Kaufman worked with Invision contributor Charles Sykes to deliver photos from inside and outside the service.
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