On September 1, 2022, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — the former president and then vice president of Argentina — was returning home from a Senate session. As she talked with a crowd of supporters gathered near her front door, an assailant pushed through the crowd, pointed a gun at her head, and pulled the trigger.

The pistol failed to fire, and the gunman — an Uber driver named Fernando Sabag Montiel — was arrested immediately. But the violent episode shocked the country and dominated the headlines for weeks.

The attack raised many questions, and as the case unfolded, La Nación committed to providing an in-depth look at the failed assassination attempt. Less than three weeks after the attack, La Nación published This is how the attack against Cristina Kirchner was planned and executed, a detailed look inside the failed attempt.

La Nación knew that it had to report the story without bias so the newsroom gathered its content solely from the evidence in the judicial case that was being built around the event. It also turned to different forms of media to support its storytelling, using visuals of images captured by different TV channels and public security cameras.

Inside the plan

To tell the story of how the attack was planned, La Nación re-created WhatsApp conversations between Montiel, his girlfriend, Brenda Uliarte, and friends beginning some five months before the attack. In those conversations, Uliarte — who was also arrested and prosecuted for the attack — talks about buying a weapon and discusses her intentions to kill the vice president.

La Nación’s innovative presentation of those messages allowed audiences to follow the conversation as Montiel and Uliarte looked for opportunities to carry out their plan using another gunman, who failed to do the job. La Nación provided narration between the conversations to move the story forward.

The newsroom followed their movements on the day of the assassination attempt, including footage from a security camera inside a tattoo shop they visited before taking a train to execute the plan themselves.

As the couple arrived by train, the story is told by images caught on cameras. La Nación also provided a map to show their actions as they moved from the train station to the vice president’s home. The stories carefully followed their movements right down to the moment Montiel put the gun to Kirchner’s head.

Catching the public’s attention

Although La Nación had been publishing visual content about the attack since it happened, it generated new attention when it stitched all the elements together and told the entire story in one compelling and innovative package. Using narration only when necessary, the newsroom told the story through the assassins’ messages and the movements caught on security cameras.

With this approach, La Nación sought to establish itself as Argentina’s most prominent media house. The story was the most-ready content of the day and was reused in subsequent sessions when the case was mentioned. On the first day alone it attracted almost 40,000 pageviews and averaged five minutes of browsing time — one of the highest numbers for any story published on La Nación.

Additionally, it caught the attention of other media outlets, gaining recommendations and reproductions on radio and television stations. Today, it continues to serve as an evergreen reference for anyone interested in learning the events behind the story.

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