used census data from the 100 largest U.S. cities as a starting point for a series of vivid portraits of the workers living and dying on the front lines of the pandemic â most are women, people of color and more likely to be immigrants. https://bit.ly/2W8DHfX
studied Facebook groups that opposed coronavirus shutdowns, finding that they shifted their target to the Black Lives Matter movement. Acting on a tip that such groups have a history of fundraising off hot-button issues, Seitz developed a database to track the groups, immersing herself in the online community to monitor misinformation and hate speech as the groups turned their attention against the Black Lives activism in the wake of George Floydâs killing.The day after Amandaâs story was published, Facebook began suppressing search results for some of the groups mentioned in her story in an effort to limit their reach.https://bit.ly/30179p1
While it is widely understood that U.S. public health departments have suffered budget cuts over the years, a collaborative AP/Kaiser Health News team used data and deep reporting to show exactly how expansive those cuts have been.
The investigation by APâs Michelle Smith, Meghan Hoyer and Mike Householder, teamed with KHNâs Lauren Weber, Laura Ungar, Hannah Recht and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, drew on data from disparate sources and interviews with more than 150 people to reveal a system starved of money and staff for years, and facing more cuts amid the worst health crisis in a century.
The teamâs all-formats package drew kudos and high-profile reaction from health officials, to the halls of Congress, to editorial pages.
For an ambitious story that laid bare the state of Americaâs public health system, the joint AP/KHN team of Smith, Hoyer, Householder, Weber, Ungar, Recht and Barry-Jester shares this weekâs Best of the States award.
The AP story came to a startling conclusion: In much of the world, medical oxygen is expensive and hard to get â a basic marker of inequality both between and within countries.
With the pandemic exposing this stark fact, AP looked primarily to Guinea to illustrate the global challenges of supplying bottled oxygen in the worldâs least developed nations. Correspondents Lori Hinnant and Carley Petesch conducted scores of interviews with health officials and nongovernmental organizations around the world, while stringers Boubacar Diallo and Youssouf Bah reported from the heart of the pandemic in the West African nation.
Their all-formats package, including wrenching accounts of families directly affected by oxygen shortages, sparked immediate reaction, including a plan outlined by the World Health Organization.
For aggressive and resourceful coverage of lethal inequities in the supply of medical oxygen to the developing world, the team of Hinnant, Petesch, Diallo and Bah earns APâs Best of the Week award.
targeted 10 states that have quickly rising coronavirus infections, finding that the crucial turnaround time to get results from a coronavirus test is exceeding federal guidelines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guideline for results is less than two days.In the absence of federal data, Cassidyâs state-by-state reporting found typical turnaround times of three days from public labs, and longer lag times at commercial labs. Her story included a global perspective, noting the turn-around time is much faster in South Korea but much worse in some other countries, including South Africa. https://bit.ly/3ePogjw
reported on a disturbing trend: the disproportionate toll of the coronavirus in Latino communities. With COVID-19 spreading deeper into the U.S., the team told the stories of individuals impacted by the pandemic, vividly illustrating the data showing that Latinos make up large portions of infected patients even in areas where they were a relatively small share of the population. https://bit.ly/2Vetpd4
Calls for police reforms after George Floydâs death in Minneapolis have echoed the calls to action after a wave of killings of young black men by police in 2014.
So what happened after those killings?
Ohio statehouse reporter Julie Carr Smyth, working with AP colleagues around the country, found that while nearly half the states have since enacted some type of reform, only a third passed legislation limiting use of force. The reporting revealed that contributions from politically influential police unions were a key factor in stalling legislation, while a separate analysis by the data team showed that Minneapolis police disproportionately used force against blacks when compared with other racial groups.
The day Smythâs story moved, a number of states made proposals to limit the use of deadly force.
For quickly reporting out and leading a national look at what reforms have taken place in the last six years, Smyth wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
China and the Trump administration had opposing narratives about the early days of the new coronavirus epidemic: China bragged about providing information quickly to the world through the World Health Organization, while the Trump administration accused China and WHO of colluding to hide information.
It took The Associated Press â drawing on recordings, documents and interviews â to tell the definitive story: Rather than colluding with China, WHO itself was being kept in the dark, praising China in public to shake loose information while expressing considerable frustration in private.
APâs widely praised story, months in the making, was so sensitive that we did not name the two main journalists to avoid blowback in China and to prevent anyone from identifying our sources.
For in-depth reporting that drew back the curtains and punctured the preferred narratives of China, WHO and the Trump administration at the same time, the AP reporters who produced this stunning piece earn Best of the Week honors.
Telling the stories of people who have suffered devastating losses is difficult at the best of times, but with this story, focused on one predominantly black rural county in southwestern Georgia where the pandemic is hitting hardest among some of Americaâs most exposed, the all-formats team of Claire Galofaro, Brynn Anderson and Angie Wang also had to cope with the challenges of reporting in a pandemic.
The journalists knew they would have to take cautious risks to tell this important story, while also dealing with the emotional and ethical issues of potentially putting the people they spoke to in danger. They spent much of their time sorting out how to best protect their sources, while also getting a story worthy of the risk those sources were taking to tell it.
That story, intimately told and richly illustrated, connected with readers, some of whom said it made the pandemic finally feel real. Many said it inspired them to act, and others wrote to compliment the journalism.
For a significant, poignant package that reveals in personal terms the already deep inequities exploited by the pandemic, Galofaro, Anderson and Wang are recognized with this weekâs Best of the States award.
looked beyond the COVID-19 data to deliver a heartbreaking, intimate portrait of Detroit, one of the cities hardest hit by the pandemic. Stafford tapped into her deep knowledge of her hometown while also fulfilling APâs mission to document inequality, showing that the grief is just part of what Detroit is facing â it is also dealing with economic uncertainty. https://bit.ly/3b6z9uR
As sweeping restrictions and lockdown measures rolled out across the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, APâs team of staff and freelancers in Italy set an example for how to produce compelling and competitive journalism in all formats despite major challenges affecting them both professionally and personally, including the very real risk of being placed in self-quarantine for covering stories in risk zones.
Three weeks into the Italian outbreak, AP produced some of the strongest coverage yet including multiple exclusives and beats across formats. That work included: How the northern town of Codogno greatly reduced the spread of the virus, a first-person account of the lockdownâs impact on families, overwhelmed doctors drawing parallels to war-time triage, rioting at Italian prisons, residents showing solidarity from their balconies, and more.
APâs coverage throughout the crisis in Italy has consistently won heavy play online and in print.
For resourceful, dedicated and inspired journalism under unusually demanding circumstances, the Rome and Milan bureaus receive APâs Best of the Week award.
led a team of AP reporters to determine if state governments are prepared to conduct contact tracing, a key requirement for restarting state economies. They began by putting a series of detailed questions to state health officials. The AP review found a patchwork of systems around the country, with many states unable to keep up with caseloads and scrambling to hire and train enough people to handle the task for the months ahead. https://bit.ly/35jbrdk
teamed up to provide the first public look at large publicly traded companies getting money set aside by Congress to help small businesses. https://bit.ly/2VKZtGe
What and when did authorities in China know about the coronavirusâ initial spread and did they react fast enough? Those have become burning questions as COVID-19 tears a deadly and destructive path across the globe.
Among the toughest to answer, too.
The Associated Press cracked open Chinaâs lockdown on information with an exclusive story â based on internal documents and expert testimony â revealing that top officials in Beijing knew about a likely pandemic, but held off on warning the public for at least six days â while tens of thousands attended a banquet in Wuhan and millions more travelled for Lunar New Year festivities.
The storyâs byline â âBy The Associated Pressâ â testified to the risks run by the reporter who secured and developed the major scoop.
For breaking through Chinaâs tightly policed walls of information control about the critical first days of the pandemic, with a scoop secured in one of the worldâs toughest media environments, the unnamed but not unsung AP reporter is this weekâs Best of the Week laureate.
requested data on racial breakdowns for the COVID-19 disease in states, cities and counties nationwide, ultimately analyzing data from eight states, six major U.S. cities and six of Floridaâs largest counties. The result was one of the first and most deeply reported examinations of the racial disparities of U.S. cases and deaths, reviewing more than 4,450 deaths and 52,000 COVID-19 cases across the country. https://bit.ly/2Xy7TSO
revealed that outbreaks of COVID-19 keep happening in nursing homes across the country despite federal lockdown orders imposed last month. The AP team found that the answer appears to lie in the insidious threat of asymptomatic staffers and other individuals who slip past screening measures, spreading the virus to entire nursing home populations. In addition, the coronavirus crisis has deepened a chronic industry staffing shortage, made protective gear scarce and led to actions by several states that force nursing homes to take recovering COVID-19 patients from overcrowded hospitals. The all-formats package included a dataset on nursing home inspection reports for members seeking to localize the story. https://bit.ly/2xWpTLQ
coordinated with colleagues around the AP to track how many police officers were getting sick with the coronavirus. Documented with exclusive nationwide data and illustrated with photos from multiple datelines, the result was a richly reported and deeply researched story on how police departments are struggling to manage the growing tally of sick officers, which rose from a few dozen to nearly 700 in a week - including Detroitâs chief of police. https://bit.ly/39vzdmY
California's Bay Area is full of extremes: poverty and wealth; homelessness and opulence; high-end industry and the service workers who support it. Those extremes matter when it comes to weathering the shutdown in response to the coronavirus.
Jocelyn Gecker and Olga Rodriguez set out to show how that divide plays out, telling the stories of Rebecca Biernat, a San Francisco attorney, and Sonia Bautista, a hotel worker, and their families. With photographer Jeff Chiu they developed an intimate portrait of the two families â what they have in common and the differences in how they are adjusting to the shutdown.
For doggedly seeking out the right subjects, overcoming distancing restrictions and expertly weaving together two tales to tell a deeper story about inequality amid turmoil, Gecker, Rodriguez and Chiu earn this weekâs Best of the States award.
used data analysis and sourcing to reveal that a $2 trillion relief package wouldnât be enough to address shortages of crucial protective equipment, and that the shortage that would likely get worse. The detailed, deeply reported story was developed through a variety of sources, exposing Americaâs broken medical supply chain, price gouging and a frontline nurseâs fear that she is inadvertently spreading COVID-19. https://bit.ly/341EiT0
The world had been waiting for this moment: the start of a clinical study searching for a vaccine for the new coronavirus â but no one knew when exactly the first shots would be given. AP reporters in Washington, D.C., learned where and when it would take place, laying the groundwork for an all-formats team to witness the start of the experiment in Seattle.
The result: AP was the only news organization present, sending updates in real time as the first participants received an experimental COVID-19 vaccine. The newsroom at APâs New York headquarters erupted in cheers when the exclusive crossed the wire; text, photos and video swept play worldwide.
For ensuring AP was the only news organization in the room at a critical juncture of the coronavirus pandemic response, and for delivering distinctive journalism to customers worldwide, the team of Lauran Neergaard, Ted Warren, Carla K. Johnson, Michael Ciaglo, Federica Narancio and Marshall Ritzel wins APâs Best of the Week award.
