for breaking the news that North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum's travel was being audited, about a month after he was criticized for attending the Super Bowl as a guest of a utility operating in his state. https://trib.in/2GomtFe
was the first to reach and get reaction from the head of the World Food Program following the Nobel Peace Prize announcement, putting AP ahead not only of other media, but the Nobel committee itself.The beat was possible thanks to Thomasâ quick reaction and the good relations the Rome video team has developed with Rome-based WFP. Thomas reached WFO Executive Director David Beasley through a longtime contact who was traveling with the director in Niger. Not only did Thomas get Beasley on the phone, she made sure he provided a video statement that AP expedited to clients. Thomas was also first to receive another clip from WFP in which Beasley, who was in Niger, celebrated the news with co-workers. A still frame was grabbed from the video, sharply handled by the London photo desk to keep AP ahead of other agencies in all formats on one of the top stories of the week. APâs urgent with Beasleyâs reaction to the peace prize moved an hour before major competitors, and video of him celebrating was five hours ahead of a primary competitor.Thomasâ scoop capped a week of excellent coverage by AP's Nobel Prize team, with fast filing of teh announcements across formats and aggressive efforts to locate and interview winners.https://bit.ly/3doVTcchttps://bit.ly/33ZR4Tz
teamed up to give AP a competitive advantage when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned, with a news alert and story moving seconds after the surprise announcement, as well as exclusive live video and key photos of the governorâs departure from New York City by helicopter following his announcement.AP journalists had been preparing for months in case Cuomo quit â and using flight tracking tools to monitor his state police helicopter. When it lifted off from Albany and began flying south to New York City, the team jumped into action. Photographers and videographers scrambled to Cuomoâs Manhattan office and the helipad he usually uses while reporters readied their prep for a possible resignation. When Cuomo began his live statement at 11:45 a.m., AP was poised for what would follow. The moment he announced his plan to resign, editor Sophie Rosenbaum on the East Desk moved an alert and a breaking news update, following less than two minutes later with a 900-word story by Albany reporter Marina Villeneuve that AP had been refining for weeks.The APâs push was minutes ahead of major competitors and New Yorkâs Jennifer Peltz handled running updates throughout the day. Video journalist Joe Frederick had a live shot of Cuomo's car pulling away from his office following the announcement and colleague David Martin had an exclusive live shot of Cuomo boarding the helicopter with his daughter and key aides. Photographers Seth Wenig and Mark Lennihan scored at least 91 front pages with their photos of Cuomoâs departure.https://aplink.news/hjchttps://aplink.video/9mi
scored a rare sit down, on-camera interview with International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva that broke news: She urged China to rethink its zero-COVID policy and said the U.S. Federal Reserve has to keep raising rates for the good of the global economy.
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for breaking the news that Baton Rougeâs police chief was firing the police officer who shot and killed Alton Sterling and suspending the other officer involved in the deadly confrontation.https://bit.ly/2uPQ9FN
for persuading the American family of a pastor sentenced to seven years in prison in China to speak to AP exclusively about the tightening grasp of Chinese authorities over religious activity, even abroad. https://bit.ly/2r4n45b
Environmental Protection Administrator Scott Pruittâs lavish spending and deep concerns about security had put his future in the Trump Cabinet in jeopardy. But what was the cost to taxpayers?
AP beat reporter Michael Biesecker, whose aggressive coverage of Pruitt began more than a year ago when Trump nominated him for the EPA post, began working sources still at the agency and those who had left in search of the answer. His findings â that Pruitt spent about a whopping $3 million on security in the first year â win the Beat of the Week award.
broke news with an early scoop on the staggering scale â hundreds of thousands of victims â in a long-awaited report on sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church. That was just the start of a week of powerful and delicate AP coverage of Franceâs first nationwide reckoning with systemic church abuse, cover-ups and decades of trauma.On the eve of the reportâs release, Paris-based senior field producer Masha Macpherson and video journalist Alex Turnbull tracked down an abuse victim who had inside information about the findings â notably, an estimated 216,000 children had been abused by clergy over the past 70 years. Their on-camera interview saw massive use.The following day, reporter Sylvie Corbet, senior producer Jeff Schaeffer, Macpherson and other Paris staffers, working closely with AP Vatican authority Nicole Winfield, produced fast-moving, comprehensive coverage on the release of the 2,500-page report. AP had live video, six video edits and two stories, including emotional reaction from victims and bishops; victimsâ groups shared AP's stories online. And Schaeffer found a searing, intimate way to tell the victimsâ side of the story in all formats: through the eyes of actor Laurent Martinez, who was abused by a priest and is working out the trauma onstage.https://aplink.news/30jhttps://aplink.video/tpthttps://aplink.news/sirhttps://aplink.video/v1t
AP entertainment video manager Ryan Pearson had interviewed Chadwick Boseman eight times since 2013. He knew the actor and his work well, and heâd worked closely with the actorâs publicist and her company.
Thatâs why the publicistâs first media call after Bosemanâs death was to Pearson and the AP â she wanted the story reported by a responsible news organization. Another outlet, she worried, was getting close.
Pearson immediately alerted colleagues and set out to write an obituary that shocked the world. The AP staff in turn responded with comprehensive all-formats coverage, the story quickly becoming the biggest of the month on AP News and mobile.
For source and beat development that led to a tip on perhaps the biggest entertainment story of the year, and delivered a stream of important work for APâs customers and audience, Pearson wins APâs Best of the Week.
developed a nuanced story around the lives of women struggling to raise awareness of the threat posed by COVID-19 in one of the worldâs least developed nations, where the virus and its effects are hidden and often overlooked.Tests, vaccines and public messaging around COVID-19 often miss many of Burkina Faso's 20 million people, despite $200 million budgeted for virus response. In a region where women are responsible for family work and community relationships, theyâve stepped up to provide information and resources amid the public health crisis and economic hardship. With funding through a grant provided by the European Journalism Centre, the AP was able to identify the women who could best share their stories with APâs audience.But this positive story, simple in inception, was challenging to tell at first. Stringer reporter Sam Mednick writes: â... COVID hasn't been front and center in Burkina Faso . ... it was really hard to find people who could speak to it since there are so many other problems they have to contend with. Once we found the (subjects of the) story I think the challenge was gaining the womenâs trust, bringing their stories to life in a way that did them justice as well as highlighted the situation in the country.âThe story achieved that, exploring the lives of two women in Kaya, a conflict area outside the capital. The package took readers deep into the lives of these women and their communities and explored how their individual efforts make them leaders in the global work against the coronavirus, as vital to their community as politicians and scientists.Video by West Africa senior producer Yesica Fisch was used by key AP clients around the world, and along with photos by freelancer Sophie Garcia, complemented the text, elevating the presentation designed by digital storytelling producer Natalie Castañeda.https://aplink.news/nnmhttps://aplink.photos/1m8https://aplink.video/wj2
for exclusively reporting that a letter from the Trump legal team to special counsel Robert Mueller called fired FBI Director James Comey âMachiavellian,â dishonest and âunbounded by law and regulation.â https://bit.ly/2ukovhs
teamed up on an all-formats project documenting what happened to historic sums of pandemic aid released to the nationâs schools.Congress has sent more than $150 billion to the states to help K-12 schools since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but the federal government has no accounting of where that money went. Over a period of months, reporter Mulvihill and data journalists Fassett and Fenn did that painstaking work, going state by state to ferret out how multiple streams of congressional funding as used. The result was a massive but granular database shared with AP customers in advance of publication, showing how much federal money each school district in the country received and how it compared to other schools â public, private and charter.With reporting help from Binkley, the team also produced three distinctive news leads: Most school districts do not intend to spend the money in the transformative ways the Biden administration envisions; virtual schools that were already fully online before the pandemic received as much or more as traditional school districts; and some Republican governors used the windfall to further school choice policies that had previously been blocked by legislatures or courts. Householder delivered the video while Krupa and Osorio handled photos in Massachusetts and Detroit respectively.Drawing on APâs national reach, the work resulted in data that customers could localize as well as two explanatory webinars and sidebars in more than a dozen states by AP statehouse reporters.https://aplink.news/jbehttps://aplink.news/usjhttps://aplink.news/thrhttps://aplink.video/b65
upended stereotypes with a deeply textured, intimate examination of a North Dakota community transformed by sudden growth.As part of the AP's ongoing coverage of the 2020 Census, Montana-based Brown went to McKenzie County, North Dakota â the center of the western oil boom and the fastest-growing county in the U.S. â to examine the impact of dramatic growth on a sleepy community on the western prairie. He charted the growth through the eyes of the people, from the old-timers who remembered riding horses through fields now lined with housing developments and oil wells, to newcomers finding their way into the fabric of the community.The story that emerged in Brownâs evocative words and photos came as something of a counternarrative to preconceived notions about how divided Americans are from one another. As revealed in graphics by Francois Duckett, a significant portion of McKenzie Countyâs newcomers are Hispanic, but many of those Brown interviewed described being embraced by the locals: the new restaurant owner helped along by customers who responded during the pandemic, or a transplanted family touched by the small-town charm of friendly faces saying hello in the grocery store.Brownâs nuanced reporting and writing gave his story a compelling narrative arc and showed the value of going to see firsthand what happens when a community is confronted with dramatic growth. https://aplink.news/bea
for building sources over seven years and gathering footage over eight months to offer an unmatched look inside the restoration of Pragueâs 600-year-old astronomical clock, in a spectacular example of visual storytelling. https://bit.ly/2ICZZOu
exclusively obtained body camera video kept secret for more than two years showing a Louisiana State Police trooper pummeling a Black motorist 18 times with a flashlight, an attack the trooper defended as âpain compliance.âThe dramatic footage of the May 2019 beating of Aaron Larry Bowman â who could be heard wailing between blows, âIâm not resisting! Iâm not resistingâ â was featured with credit to AP on news broadcasts by all three major U.S. networks and in matcher stories by The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. APâs coverage also included exclusively obtained investigative documents on the case and an emotional all-formats interview with Bowman, conducted just a few weeks earlier, in which he recounted the beating that left him with a broken jaw, broken ribs, a broken wrist and a deep gash in his head.The piece by Mustian and Bleiberg shared a theme with several of the weekâs top AP stories: They shed light on issues fundamental to democracy that no one would have known about without the AP. This was just latest in a series of AP exclusives on the Louisiana State Police that began with stunning coverage of the deadly arrest of Ronald Greene by troopers from the same headquarters. Greeneâs arrest was kept under wraps before AP obtained video and published it earlier this year. Federal prosecutors are now examining both cases in a widening investigation into police brutality and potential cover-ups involving both troopers and state police brass.This weekâs story, accompanied by a video package from Stacey Plaisance and photographs by Rogelio Solis, saw strong play online with 225,000 pageviews on AP News and was APâs most-engaged story of the week with readers.https://aplink.news/tc9https://aplink.video/acm
deconstructed how the Louisiana State Police scandal of beatings and cover-ups could have gone on for so long, digging deeper into the institutional thinking of the agency, its history and the background of key figures. They interviewed dozens of current and former troopers and uncovered thousands of pages of documents that described an entrenched culture of impunity, nepotism and in some cases outright racism.This story, the latest in their investigative series stemming from the deadly 2019 arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene, was built around a father who rose to second in command of the state agency despite being reprimanded for racist behavior, and his son who became one of the state policeâs most violent troopers â with the brunt of his use of force directed at Black people.Mustian and Bleiberg, federal law enforcement reporters, also had never-before-reported details of a 2019 cheating scandal in the state police academy that targeted the entire class for dismissal. In the end, nearly everyone in the class was allowed to graduate. And they conducted a revealing interview with the head of the state police in which he admitted he doesnât know how many other cases like Ronald Greeneâs could still be out there because âweâve not looked at every video.âThe story, accompanied by video and photos by multiformat journalist Allen Breed, added to calls for a federal investigation, and Louisiana lawmakers created a special committee to dig into reports of excessive force. The piece also resonated with readers, scoring strong play online and ranking as one of the most-engaged stories of the week.https://aplink.news/3zuhttps://aplink.video/ysmhttps://aplink.news/xda
As APâs staff in Afghanistan grappled with the turmoil of the U.S. evacuation, an AP trio half a world away â Pentagon reporters Bob Burns and Lita Baldor and State Department reporter Matt Lee, with contributions by colleagues â set the standard, breaking news on the monthâs most competitive story.
Whether posing tough questions at government briefings or getting the deeper story through one-on-one reporting, the reporters turned out crisp stories that were fair, accurate and authoritative. From the eyebrow-raising visit of two U.S. lawmakers, to the suicide bombing outside Kabulâs airport, to analysis of the ultimate beneficiary of Americaâs $83 billion expenditure, their coverage kept AP consistently out front.
For repeatedly scooping the competition and setting the news agenda on the closely watched, fast-developing events in Afghanistan, the team of Bob Burns, Lita Baldor and Matthew Lee is APâs Best of the Week â First Winner.
for building on their previous reporting about the Brothers Home, where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history had taken place. Kim and Klug have now revealed that the notorious facility was part of an orphanage pipeline feeding the demand of private adoption agencies. A former U.S. diplomat specializing in the Koreas said the story shows âThe AP continues to be second to none in South Korea-based investigative reporting.â https://bit.ly/2KkAe7C
for revealing that whistleblowers were punished at Washington's largest psychiatric hospital, which just lost federal funding because of repeated staff shortages and problems. https://bit.ly/2LgadVt
for tracking from South America a source at the White House who confirmed that President Trump on at least three occasions last year pressed his aides in private about the possibility of invading Venezuela. https://bit.ly/2KVFl0r