for reporting exclusively that a failed wind energy project off the coast of New Jersey had burned through $10.6 million in federal money before the U.S. Department of Energy cut off its funding: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/2f22bca05âŠ
collaborated with Chalkbeat, a non-profit that reports on U.S. education, to reveal that schools serving primarily students of color were far more likely to start the year online than schools serving mostly white students â a divide that threatens to further exacerbate inequities in education.Fenn and Hoyer gathered and analyzed the data from hundreds of school districts, while Rubinkam and Vertuno interviewed school administrators, parents and educators to learn about the pressures that shaped districtsâ choices. The all-formats story was co-reported and co-written with Chalkbeat. https://bit.ly/2Rwwxirhttps://bit.ly/2FHfNCwhttps://bit.ly/3iAuaa8https://bit.ly/3iF2KQo
The Obama administration is racing in its final days to keep industry out of natural and environmentally sensitive areas throughout the U.S. West, where the incoming Trump administration has raised fears of loosened regulations on federal lands.
Billings, Montana Correspondent Matt Brown _ who has an acute sense of the value in reporting on land out West _ has broken news repeatedly to keep the AP ahead.
Brown is deeply sourced with federal interior officials and consistently checks in with them. He was working on a story week about officials canceling oil and gas leases on land near Glacier National Park that's considered sacred to tribes â also an APNewsBreak â when Interior Secretary Sally Jewell mentioned she was coming back to Montana in a week.
teamed up to provide the fastest, most complete coverage of the Trump administrationâs announcement that it would resettle no more than 15,000 refugees in 2021, another record low.Their work began days before the Sept. 30 deadline for a decision. Lee worked sources on his State Department beat, while Watson drew on her long experience covering refugees, speaking with advocates and with an Eritrean refugee in the U.S. whose dream of reuniting with his family became more remote as a result of Trumpâs decision. At 11:26 p.m. on the evening of the deadline, Lee received confirmation of the 15,000 cap from the State Department. Watson rushed it to wire, delivering a 700-word story by 12:04 a.m., including a quote of Trump vilifying refugees at a campaign rally that night in Minnesota. A major competitor moved its story at 2:37 a.m., and no one else had a story for hours. https://bit.ly/2Gr9NyA
teamed up on a timely package examining racial gerrymandering and how it disenfranchises thousands of Black voters in Alabama.With the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments in a case challenging the stateâs Republican-drawn maps, and redistricting likely to factor into the 2022 midterm elections, AP journalists used on-the ground reporting, data analysis and experience at the high court to shine a light on the consequences of Alabamaâs highly gerrymandered districts.The result was a timely all-formats package on how the cynical practice has largely robbed Black residents in Alabama of their political voice.Read more
for breaking news revealing how the U.S. government has quietly begun releasing Haitian immigrants who have been pouring into the country in recent months, marking a reversal from officials' previous stance that the migrants would be jailed. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-begins-relea...
for obtaining a document that allowed her to report exclusively that a Mexican man accused of raping a 13-year-old girl on a Greyhound bus that traveled through Kansas has been voluntarily removed from the U.S. nine times and deported 10 times. http://apne.ws/2iMKjuV
for obtaining an exclusive interview with the new interim U.S. attorney for half of Pennsylvania about his son's heroin death, the first time the prosecutor had spoken publicly about the tragedy. http://bit.ly/2iJCUfS
Itâs hard to imagine why anyone would plead guilty to a crime they didnât commit. But as Richmond-based reporter Alanna Durkin Richer and Miami legal affairs reporter Curt Anderson found, it happens more often than you might think.
Digging through publicly available data on exonerations, they found alarming statistics: More than 300 of the roughly 1,900 people who have been exonerated in the U.S. since 1989 pleaded guilty. So Richer and Anderson set out to explain why anyone would plead guilty to a crime he or she didnât commit ...
This AP exclusive started with a tip: A Republican nominee in Ohio had made questionable claims about his tenure in the Air Force.
J.R. Majewski told voters he was a combat veteran with a tour of duty in Afghanistan, but reporters Brian Slodysko and James LaPorta, joined by investigative researcher Randy Herschaft, reported extensively using public documents, expert interviews and a survey of former employers, revealing that among multiple misrepresentations, Majewski did not deploy to Afghanistan but instead spent six-months loading planes in Qatar. He was also demoted and barred from reenlisting.
The story was a hit with readers and had rival news outlets citing APâs exclusive, while the Republican Party pulled its advertising money from Majewski, essentially giving up on his race.
For deep source work and dogged reporting that exposed a political candidateâs blatant lies about his record, Slodysko, LaPorta and Herschaft take APâs Best of the Week â First Winner honors.
Baton Rouge-based reporter Michael Kunzelman was reporting on the police killing of a black man outside a convenience store last summer when a source called to encourage him to look into a case in front of a federal judge that had been mysteriously reassigned. It wasnât the easiest time to be chasing down tips: the Alton Sterling shooting was swiftly followed by the killings of three law enforcement officials and then catastrophic flooding in Louisianaâs capital.
But Kunzelman didnât forget about it.
When he was free, he began an investigation into the performance of U.S. District Judge Patricia Minaldi, work that would take months and aggressive use of public records. It culminated with the discovery last week sheâd been ordered to seek treatment for alcoholism so severe that a colleague believed she couldnât take care of herself. For his work Kunzelman wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
In the course of source-building in early 2016, northeastern Pennsylvania correspondent Michael Rubinkam had lunch with a local lawyer. The lawyer mentioned that a member of the U.S. attorney's office had lost a son to heroin but had never spoken publicly about it.
Intrigued, Rubinkam asked the lawyer to approach the then-assistant prosecutor, Bruce Brandler, about an interview. Rubinkam had been looking for fresh ways to write about the scourge of heroin, and saw the prosecutorâs story as a powerful new example of how no family is immune.
But Brandler, he learned, was adamantly against going public with his familyâs â and his sonâs â story. It was too painful.
used multiformat field reporting and extensive research to document extraordinary efforts to save rare fish populations from the environmental effects of climate-fueled megafires across the western U.S.While interviewing biologists, environment writer Flesher learned details of a rescue of Rio Grande cutthroat trout and coordinated with Peterson who later shot photos and video, including underwater images of the fish's release 750 miles away in New Mexicoâs Carson Nation Forest.The distinctive package played widely in the western U.S. and beyond, drawing readers and viewers.Read more
for an Only on AP investigation that produced the most complete tally of fatal crashes of vehicles transporting migrant farmworkers in the U.S., and detailed the enforcement gaps and agriculture industry pressures that get much of the blame for crashes. http://apne.ws/2hYlkIe
Itâs difficult to write a compelling story about a highly technical subject, harder still to produce a rich visual package on a literally invisible threat â but this all-formats AP team rose to the challenge, delivering an engaging package on âsuper emittersâ of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas.
The journalists took the coordinates of 533 known sites along the Texas-New Mexico border and painstakingly cross-referenced them with public documents to piece together the corporations most likely responsible. And because methane is invisible, AP used a specialized infrared camera to make mesmerizing still and video images of the gas spewing into the sky.
The package, as distinctive as it is alarming, received heavy play and readership, and had impact: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it was launching an enforcement action.
For smart, innovative journalism, and above all teamwork, Michael Biesecker, Helen Wieffering, David Goldman, Mike Pesoli and Dario Lopez earn APâs Best of the Week â First Winner honors.
It began as an anniversary story, but one that would break news. With North Carolinaâs hotly-contested âbathroom bill,â HB2, in place for nearly a year, APâs Raleigh bureau was asked by the South Desk to assess the economic impact of the law limiting protections for the LGBT community.
Reporters Jonathan Drew and Emery Dalesio created a spreadsheet tallying the results of their digging, including searches of public records, among them previously unseen state calculations of lost business; they interviewed corporate leaders and state and local officials. And they were able to put a hard minimum figure on huge losses to the state economy even as legislators were negotiating a revision of HB2. âThe deal was struck,â The New York Times noted, âdays after The Associated Press reported that the backlash against the law would cost North Carolina at least $3.7 billion in business over 12 years.â
The timely exclusive by Drew and Dalesio is the Beat of the Week.
for using emails obtained through a records request and a lawsuit to show that a Kansas election official had an affair with a woman he promoted and used her to skirt oversight of their lavish expenses before moving on to lead the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. http://apne.ws/2enAAeJ
Many white Americans have likely never heard of âsundown towns,â where Black people were once forbidden after dark. So Tim Sullivan, Noreen Nasir and Maye-E Wong visited one such town, Vienna, Illinois, on the second stop in APâs âLooking for Americaâ series, to see how it is faring in a year marked by racial protests.
While there is no longer a rule against Black people in Vienna after sunset, the habit persists for many out of fear and tradition. With deep reporting and compelling visuals, the AP team captured a lingering racial divide that is obvious to some people but virtually invisible to others.
For a probing but nuanced package that speaks to a thread of systemic racism, the all-formats team of Sullivan, Nasir and Wong earns this weekâs Best of the States award.
As domestic production of oil has increased in recent years, Billings, Montana, Correspondent Matthew Brown closely followed derailments of trains carrying volatile crude. A train from North Dakota jumped the track, exploded and killed 47 people in Canada in 2013. In Brownâs own state, a derailment near the town of Culbertson spilled 27,000 gallons of oil in 2015. Last year, Brown reported that more than 800 potential safety violations were discovered on Union Pacific freight lines after a fiery June 2016 oil train derailment in Oregonâs Columbia River Gorge.
But Brown wanted to know how widespread the problem really was. By pushing repeatedly for public records and working with a longtime source, Brown was able to exclusively report the results of a two-year federal inspection program for the nationâs oil trains â and he revealed that some safety defects uncovered where similar to ones blamed in derailments that triggered huge fires or oil spills in Oregon, Virginia, Montana and elsewhere. For his AP NewsBreak, Brown wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
When the arrival of militarized federal agents in Portland, Oregon, escalated tensions in the stateâs largest city â energizing the racial justice movement and inflaming protests outside the federal courthouse â APâs all-formats coverage shined all week.
The AP team, often at risk themselves, delivered a steady stream of breaking news developments, searing images of nightly clashes involving lasers, fires, homemade bombs and tear gas, as well as exclusive coverage from inside the courthouse.
For a weekâs worth of powerful, revealing stories and startling images that provided insight into the events in Portland, the team of Flaccus, Berger, Sanchez, Ranen, Balsamo, Selsky, Cline and Fauria wins APâs Best of the States award.
