Best of the States

AP Exclusive: US Catholic Church lobbies, gets windfall in federal PPP funds

Based on a tip following AP’s previous reporting on the Paycheck Protection Program, AP anticipated that the Roman Catholic Church might be one of the program’s biggest winners. 

Investigative reporters Reese Dunklin and Michael Rezendes started digging, first showing how the church had successfully lobbied for special treatment under the program, then, when the federal data dropped, the full extent of the church’s windfall. An analysis on deadline revealed $1.4 billion to $3.5 billion in forgivable loans, with many millions going to dioceses that paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy because of sexual abuse claims.

The story had an immediate impact with strong play and engagement in digital, print and broadcast outlets.

For being both first and authoritative on this highly competitive story, and for holding a remarkably powerful institution accountable, Dunklin and Rezendes share this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Viral photo captures mood, fears, threats in pandemic-dominated 2020

For many in the U.S. and around the world, 2020 has been one of the most challenging years in recent memory – and a single wildfire photo by freelance photographer Noah Berger, on assignment for the AP, captured the danger, fear and uncertainty wrought by the pandemic. 

The ironic image of a sign, surrounded by flames while urging safety, was widely interpreted as a pointed commentary on 2020. The photo went viral and was among AP’s most downloaded images of the month.

And that was just one of many photos and videos by Berger that helped put the AP ahead of the competition in recent coverage of fires in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

For his courageous and committed work, and a remarkable photo that frames much of 2020 in the context of a raging wildfire, Noah Berger wins AP’s Best of the Week award. 

Best of the Week — First Winner

Dual honorees: Stunning coverage of Belarus protests, and a Ganges River odyssey

This week two distinctly different bodies of work share AP’s weekly honors for their outstanding coverage:

An all-formats team in Minsk, Belarus, facing constant police intimidation, continued to provide extensive coverage of mass protests over the nation’s disputed presidential election. That work included exclusive video of a bloody protester falling to the ground dead in front of heavily armed police, footage that forced the government to reverse its narrative of the incident.

And in work of a different dimension entirely, New Delhi photographer Altaf Qadri spent many months documenting life along the 1,700-mile River Ganges, considered sacred by almost 1 billion Hindus in India. 

Starting with a treacherous two-day hike to the foot of the Himalayas – the remote source of the Ganges – and ending in the fast disappearing mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, Qadri captured a breathtaking range along his odyssey: celebration and death, solitude and fellowship, daily life and holy rites. 

For extraordinary work in enterprise and spot news journalism, Altaf Qadri and the Belarus team of Mstyslav Chernov, Sergei Grits, Yuras Karmanau, Dimitri Kozlov and Dmitri Lovetsky share AP’s Best of the Week award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

An intimate look at LA’s Watts, 55 years after violence erupted

traced the Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles from the 1965 riots to the Watts of today. While Watts did not experience the violent protests that shook parts of LA and other cities in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the AP team found a neighborhood still bearing scars 55 years after a traffic stop of a Black motorist by a white police officer led to a mass uprising and widespread violence. Through words, photos, video and archival images, the trio takes an intimate look at the challenges facing Watts at a time when racial justice and police violence are central issues in America.https://bit.ly/2E90pxThttps://bit.ly/2Ei193Whttps://bit.ly/34b1wbo

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP scoop on Justice Department investigation of Yale discrimination

landed a scoop on a Justice Department investigation into higher education. Balsamo got word through sources that the two-year investigation was completed and had found something attention-grabbing: Yale University was illegally discriminating against Asian American and white applicants, in violation of federal civil rights law. Working with education reporter Collin Binkley, the pair scrambled to move a story that crushed other major news outlets by nearly an hour. Thanks to Binkley’s reporting, the AP was also first to get Yale’s statement on the probe, which it said was “hasty” and unfair. https://bit.ly/34cw1gT

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Sourcing, hustle put AP far ahead with story of Israel-UAE ties

dominated from the start with fast, comprehensive and nuanced reporting on the diplomatic ties initiated between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Lee had a heads-up that the deal was in the offing hours ahead of the announcement and obtained a copy of the forthcoming statement. That gave Federman and Gambrell time to prewrite a story and an alert ahead of the anticipated tweet from President Donald Trump. When Trump’s tweet duly landed, AP’s NewsAlert moved a minute later, just before White House reporters entered the Oval Office. And another minute later, a 1,000-word, triple-byline story hit the wire. Meanwhile AP broadcast colleagues, also alerted, were well ahead of the competition with coverage of developments and reaction from Middle East points. https://bit.ly/3ha2J6i

Best of the States

The pandemic crisis ‘laid bare’ in AP report from Texas maternity ward

Few places in America have been as hard hit by the pandemic as the Texas border, and the package by this all-formats team exposes the stark contrast between this part of the country and regions with greater resources. 

With access to two hospitals overwhelmed by cases in the Rio Grande Valley, AP reporter Paul Weber, photographer Eric Gay and video journalist John Mone carefully documented stories of patients and staff, including a new mom in the maternity ward who unknowingly contracted the virus and had to be isolated from her newborn. 

Weber wrote: “The U.S. failure to contain the pandemic has been laid bare.”

For a compelling and hard-to-report all-formats package, Weber, Gay and Mone win this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Secret court documents reveal case against Colombian ex-president

obtained, through personal contacts and sources, 1500 pages of secret court documents that detail the evidence and justification behind a decision by Colombia’s Supreme Court subjecting former president Alvaro Uribe to house arrest while he awaits formal charges for alleged witness tampering. The documents include accounts of urgent WhatsApp messages, secretly recorded meetings and intercepted phone calls that reveal a rushed search by Uribe’s team for witnesses – loyalists willing to do anything necessary to stop the case from proceeding. https://bit.ly/2XTiPtu

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP exclusive leads to release of migrant kids held in US hotels for deportation

Earmarked for deportation, the immigrant children, some mere toddlers, were parked in nondescript hotels – out of sight and, the Trump administration thought, out of mind.  But not out of reach of an Associated Press exclusive.

With an investigation based on source work, court records and witness accounts, immigration reporter Nomaan Merchant exposed how the Trump administration held children in hotels despite federal anti-trafficking laws and court rulings that mandate child-appropriate facilities.

Merchant’s exclusive sparked outrage and accusations of child abuse. Five days later, the Trump administration said it would not expel 17 people, including children, detained at one Texas hotel, and the hotels pledged to stop allowing the practice.

For his investigative story that punctured layers of secrecy and changed the fortunes of all-but-invisible immigrant children, Merchant wins AP’s Best of the Week award. 

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

In French Guiana, virus exposes inequality, colonial legacy

pulled off a thoughtful, enterprising story about how the pandemic was playing out in France’s South American territory, French Guiana. With revealing interviews, Pedram showed how French Guiana’s outbreak exposed deep economic and racial inequality in the overseas department of about 300,000 people where poverty is rampant and health care is scarce. The story hit the two themes that are dominating news agendas among AP clients: the pandemic and racial inequality.In an AP interview, a representative of French Guiana’s Indigenous communities explained how the appearance of white doctors sent from the French mainland caused alarm, not relief. “There is still in the minds the time of colonization and the havoc wreaked by viruses brought by colonizers,” Jean-Philippe Chambrier, a member of the Arawak tribe, told Pedram. “So when they saw white people from the mainland, they made the link.”The story included images by photojournalist Pierre Olivier Jay. https://bit.ly/2WRNPK1

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Documenting the care of Spain’s most vulnerable generation

spent two weeks accompanying home health care workers and emergency medical personnel as they tended to isolated and elderly patients in Spain, some of whom survived the Spanish Civil War and are now enduring new coronavirus. With exquisite visual storytellling, Morenatti captured both dedicated health care professionals and a frail, vulnerable generation, not only in the patients’ masked faces but in their artwork, religious icons, trinkets and family photographs – the artifacts of a lifetime. The unique images, unmistakably European, are at once beautifully realized, intimate and heartbeaking. https://bit.ly/2V9nvKS

Best of the States

Joint investigation details hollowed-out US public health departments

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 AP’s Michelle Smith, Meghan Hoyer and Mike Householder, teamed with KHN’s 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 team’s 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 America’s public health system, the joint AP/KHN team of Smith, Hoyer, Householder, Weber, Ungar, Recht and Barry-Jester shares this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the States

AP scoops everyone on dramatic ouster of federal prosecutor

After a heads-up tip to Justice Department reporter Michael Balsamo, what unfolded on that Friday night was strange: The top Manhattan federal prosecutor – the one investigating President Donald Trump’s allies – was said to be resigning his job. 

The AP was out with the story for at least a half hour before the competition. But that was just the beginning, as U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman reported for work the next day, only to step down amid conflicting statements from the White House and Justice Department. Balsamo and Neumeister were out front again, making sense of the shifting story with well-sourced detail and context.

For work that put the AP way ahead with both the breaking news and the meaning of the maneuvering, Balsamo and Neumeister share this week’s Best of the States honors.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP all-formats team gives voice to protesters globally

covering mass protests against racial injustice overcame the challenges of reporting from fluid, often chaotic scenes, sometimes punctuated by confrontation and violence, to tell the personal stories of individual demonstrators in a rich multimedia package. More than a dozen AP video journalists, reporters and photographers fanned out across the globe to ask protesters their reasons for taking to the streets, providing a diverse, intimate look inside the movement.https://bit.ly/3dvfeqyhttps://bit.ly/3ewaMZR

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Whiplash over troops in DC yields 2 scoops

scored two scoops in a single day: first, that the Pentagon was ordering active-duty troops deployed to the capital region to return to their home bases – followed hours later by Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s reversal of that order after visiting the White House. Baldor’s credibility with senior military officials gave her the sourcing to break both ends of that sudden turn of events, and sent other news outlets scrambling to match her reporting. https://bit.ly/3hieF6r

Best of the States

AP takes an in-depth look at the life of Ahmaud Arbery, killed while running

When smartphone video emerged more than two months after Ahmaud Arbery was killed by a white father and son while running through a Georgia neighborhood, the case burst into the national consciousness. AP race and ethnicity writer Aaron Morrison headed to Brunswick, Georgia, seeking to tell the full story of the 25-year-old’s life. 

Morrison and video journalist Sarah Blake Morgan interviewed Arbery’s mother on the road where her son was killed. That conversation became a centerpiece of the text and visual package, with further reporting by Russ Bynum and Kate Brumback completing the picture. 

For a nuanced and unflinching profile of Arbery’s life that spotlights the racism experienced by many young black men and captures the pain of a grieving family, Morrison, Morgan, Bynum and Brumback share this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Coverage of Floyd protests, Brazil’s virus toll, commands global attention

The end of May saw unprecedented news: The coronavirus pandemic continued to spread infection and wreak economic havoc around the globe, while much of the world’s attention pivoted suddenly to protests across the U.S. that spread to Paris, London, Australia and elsewhere after the suffocation death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

This week’s Best of the Week recognizes AP’s work surrounding each of those mega-stories, with top honors going to Baltimore-based photographer Julio Cortez for his iconic photo of a protester holding an American flag aloft, and to the AP all-formats team in Brazil for continuing coverage of the virus in a nation being ravaged by COVID-19.

Best of the Week — First Winner

A matter of trust: Covering a remarkable funeral in the midst of the pandemic

Thousands upon thousands of funerals, many not related to COVID-19, are being held during the global pandemic. Washington photographer Jacquelyn Martin provided a very personal look at one of them. 

Martin spent weeks getting to know the family whose mother had died, gaining their trust. But the family’s plans for an elaborate funeral were interrupted by the pandemic and social distancing rules. More weeks passed before the funeral home said it could go ahead. Martin was ready, poised with her camera and notebook, given extraordinary access to a family’s very private moment.

Her moving text and photos captured the essence of the funeral and the family's grief – and its celebration of a life. “Beautiful images shown with so much dignity,” one person wrote.

For her heartfelt account and elegant images, Jacquelyn Martin receives AP’s Best of the Week honors.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Finance reports reveal North Dakota GOP infighting

used campaign finance reports to document North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is helping bankroll a political action campaign aimed at unseating a powerful legislator and fellow Republican who had frustrated some of Burgum’s goals. Burgum was elected in 2016 as an outsider businessman, and has long clashed with the state’s Republican old guard, including House Appropriations Chairman Jeff Delzer. https://bit.ly/2LM84CL

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP interview: Mom threatened by crowd leaned on faith

gave AP the first national interview with a black woman who faced down an armed all-white group – led by a sheriff’s deputy – that tried to force its way into her home. The woman, Monica Shepard, had talked to two local television stations but was avoiding further media contact. Foreman, however, felt there was a deeper story to be told.

He eventually reached Shepard and her son through their attorney, arranging for an online interview to capture video. “I was vulnerable. They had the crowd. They had the weapons. I had nothing,” Shepard told Foreman. “I was standing before a crowd, but I had the faith.” Foreman’s compelling story gave AP the beat on other media that were trying to interview the family, and was used even by outlets that had previously covered the incident.https://bit.ly/2Xfxtdnhttps://bit.ly/2zl3sB5