Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP reports on consequences of shrinking US police ranks

spent weeks finding and reporting on real people across the country affected by the trickle-down effects of a shortage of police offers.Instead of focusing solely on the police, whose ranks are thinning because of burnout and other issues, Portland, Oregon-Based Flaccus, working with photographer Mitchelldyer, gave voice to the parents of a cold-case victim whose case was pushed aside because of rising gun homicides.In Philadelphia, Lauer and photographer Rourke showed how complaints have swelled over abandoned cars and other quality-of-life issues in low-income areas. And in Los Angeles, Dazio, video journalist Garcia and photographer Dovarganes found the problem has deeply impacted police homeless outreach.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Exclusive reveals probe into actions of WHO’s Syria leader

revealed the largest internal investigation conducted by the World Health Organization in years — over allegations by WHO staffers in Syria that their boss mismanaged millions of dollars, plied government officials with gifts and acted frivolously as COVID-19 swept the country.A tip last November about misconduct in the Syria office led to nearly a year of document reporting and source work for Cheng, AP London-based medical writer. Instrumental to this story was her previous reporting about accusations of racism against WHO’s regional director in the Western Pacific. That coverage led to the director being placed on leave, which persuaded Syria staffers of WHO, some of whom had been reluctant to talk to AP, that Cheng’s reporting could result in concrete action. They provided further documentation of Dr. Akjemal Magtymova’s management practices in Syria, and Cheng had her exclusive.The story won massive play in the Middle East and WHO dispatched an ethics team to Cairo, while major AP competitors reached out to congratulate Cheng on her scoop.Read more

Best of the Week — First Winner

Months of prep, source work propel AP to dominance on student loan forgiveness

How President Joe Biden would deliver on his campaign promise to forgive student loan debt was one of the most closely watched decisions coming out of the White House this summer.

As anticipation built, and other news organizations couched their reporting in terms of what Biden was “expected to” announce, AP’s Washington bureau worked sources to deliver a massive scoop, confirming and reporting the details 16 hours before Biden stood in front of the cameras.

What followed was no less impressive: All nine of AP’s stories, breaking and enterprise, centered on real people, with on-camera reaction from borrowers, as well as a Q&A updated by search trends, an engaging Instagram reel, a Twitter Spaces session and more. In all, AP’s coverage pulled in 1.1 million views on AP News and 1.2 million interactions on Facebook. For preparation and determined reporting that produced a major scoop, deep coverage and resourceful engagement on an issue affecting millions of Americans, AP is delighted to honor the team of Seung Min Kim, Zeke Miller, Chris Megerian, Michael Balsamo, Collin Binkley, Bianca Vázquez Toness, Adriana Morga, Cora Lewis and Alex Connor as Best of the Week — First Winner.

Best of the Week — First Winner

4 Hours in Huntington: how the heroin epidemic choked a city

The scene, presented in the most vivid close-up, shows a paramedic frantically pushing an IV full of an opioid blocker into the vein of a woman turning blue and barely breathing. Then the radio squawks: Two more overdoses just reported. Where will Claire Galofaro’s riveting narrative go from here?

“The woman’s eyes blinked open” she writes next. Then: “Red lights on the phone at the 911 dispatch center flashed faster and faster until all 16 lines were screaming. They called from the dining room of a rickety house, the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, the bathroom of a gas station. `People are dying everywhere,’ one caller said.”

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP finds inflation limiting access to Indigenous foods

differentiated AP’s inflation coverage from that of other news organizations, telling the real-world stories of an underrepresented population — urban Native Americans — to vividly illustrate the financial burden of rising food prices on minority communities.Deeply sourced and richly told in the voices of their subjects, the trio’s all-formats story takes readers into a community struggling to maintain access to traditional Indigenous foods that are often unavailable or too expensive for Native families in urban areas, already faced with financial, medical and cultural concerns. The recent inflation spike has priced such foods even further out of reach.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

School chief Ritz's office backed app deal without bidding

or reporting that the head of the Indiana Department of Education's office circumvented the rules ...

http://bit.ly/2cEXVFF

Best of the Week — First Winner

Lightning-fast coverage by eyewitness Goodman puts AP far ahead on Rushdie attack

Miami-based AP reporter Josh Goodman was in the audience at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York — enjoying his vacation — when a man rushed the stage and stabbed Salman Rushdie, the author who has lived under threat of death since 1989. In the critical moments that followed, Goodman cemented a huge competitive advantage for AP on one of the biggest global news stories of the week.

Amid chaos in the hall, Goodman shot smartphone images of people attending to Rushdie as he lay on the stage, then quickly sent photos and dictated details to AP. Some 20 minutes after the attack, AP had an alert and photos in the hands of members and customers.

Goodman continued reporting for all formats while colleagues from New York to Iran pitched in on the story. No news organization could catch up in those initial hours.

For extraordinary work across formats by an accomplished and experienced journalist who understood the needs of AP clients and how to handle breaking news when it erupted in front of him, Goodman earns AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: DEA appeared to intervene after off-duty shooting by agent

investigated a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent’s deadly shooting of a mentally ill neighbor in Mississippi, revealing new details that raise questions about why the agent never faced trial on a murder charge — and the role played by DEA brass to quickly insert themselves into the case, blocking local authorities from talking to the agent.Mustian exclusively obtained hundreds of pages of investigative documents and transcripts, and spent days on the ground interviewing people with knowledge of the case for a story that questions the justification for the shooting, how Agent Harold Duane Poole avoided trial and whether the DEA overreached to protect one of its own amid a flurry of misconduct cases in the agency.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Revealing look at Canada’s troubled euthanasia system

reported extensively on Canada’s euthanasia laws, which are some of the world’s most permissive and have spurred criticism from the United Nations and even the pope. AP medical writer Cheng noticed a pattern after several troubling incidents in the country; she found Canada has fewer safeguards in place than many other countries. Terminal illness is not a requirement for euthanasia, and treatment of the disabled is a particular outlier.The piece includes families’ experiences: Detroit-based video journalist Householder crossed the border to Ontario, telling the story of a woman who was shocked that her father was accorded euthanasia within days of a fall, and Cheng reported on a man whose application for euthanasia listed just one condition: hearing loss.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Source work documents Russia recruiting prisoners to fight

found sources who gave detailed accounts of covert Russian military recruitment efforts — including offers of amnesty to prisoners — to make up the manpower shortage as losses mount in Ukraine.Getting anyone to speak, even off the record, about the recruitment drive has been virtually impossible. But AP’s reporter, unnamed for their security, managed to obtain access to a Russian social network group for family members of prisoners. One woman agreed to speak privately about how her boyfriend declined the offer to fight but others accepted the offer; she said eight had died in Ukraine.Another contact, the father of a soldier, corroborated reports of hundreds of Russian soldiers refusing to fight or trying to leave the military.Read more

Best of the Week — First Winner

A ‘graveyard’: Distinctive images capture the impact of major drought on Nevada’s Lake Mead

Las Vegas-based photographer John Locher has seen no shortage of drought in his years covering the Southwest desert. But this year felt different, particularly when it came to Lake Mead, a popular tourist destination and important source of water, where levels have plummeted.

Over the course of several weeks, he made repeat visits to the lake, talking to people on beached boats, exploring different areas and running down visual leads he found on social media.

Little by little, a theme began to emerge: The receding body of water had effectively exposed a graveyard, not just of sunken boats, but also of wildlife. Locher captured this in a unique visual essay used widely and prominently by AP members and customers across the country.

For persistence, creativity and shoe-leather reporting to reveal in striking images the precipitous decline of Lake Mead, Locher earns AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner.

Best of the States

Police losing battle to get drivers to put down their phones

Who hasn’t glanced out the car window and seen another driver, head down, texting furiously? That was the genesis of a story by Boston-based reporter Denise Lavoie, who took an authoritative nationwide look at the texting-while-driving scourge and law enforcement’s losing battle to stop it.

Lavoie did spot checks with a handful of states around the country, as well as interviews with federal transportation officials and others. Her reporting – AP’s first major attempt to grasp the scope of the problem – found that police are fighting a losing battle despite adopting some pretty creative methods to catch serial texters in the act.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP pair raises awareness of overlooked Atlanta Race Massacre

delivered a distinctive enterprise package, shining light on the little-recognized 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre which involved the killings of at least 25 Black people and the destruction of Black-owned businesses.Warren, an Atlanta desk editor who also writes and edits for the AP’s Race and Ethnicity Team, has a passion and eye for history, particularly overlooked events related to race. Through diligent source work and reporting — and despite the misgivings of some Atlantans — he and multiformat colleague Sharon Johnson developed an engaging all-formats package raising awareness of the massacre and making it relevant to the current racial reckoning in the U.S.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP sources: Ukrainian grain shipments won’t solve food crisis

combined on-the-ground reporting, key analysis from experts and their own subject expertise to shed light on the real-world impact and limitations of renewed Ukrainian grain exports on the global food crisis.The team’s reporting reveals how everyone from Lebanese farmers and Syrian refugees to African aid groups don’t expect the much-publicized initial shipments to solve food insecurity as millions go hungry. The story builds on months of AP coverage showing how the Russia-Ukraine war has worsened the effects of drought, inflation, conflict and other factors in countries gripped by hunger.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: As imperiled species recover, some pose threat to others

reported exclusively and in all formats on a little-noticed ripple effect of saving endangerd wildlife: Some formerly imperiled species such as bald eagles, gray seals and merlin falcons are harming the recovery of others in dire shape by outcompeting them for food and living space.Studying scientific papers, interviewing experts and reporting from field — where researchers were using a robotic owl — the journalists found the pattern was showing up repeatedly. It didn’t mean conservation laws and programs were flawed, biologists said, but it showed that rescuing individual species wasn’t always enough — ecosystems need protection as well.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

The story behind Heller’s explosive 1972 ‘Tuskegee Study’ investigation

provided the first behind-the-scenes look at one of American journalism’s biggest scoops: how the AP's Jean Heller, then a 29-year-old reporter and the only woman on the wire service’s fledgling investigative team, broke the story of a notorious government experiment on Black men in rural Alabama.For the 50th anniversary of the AP exclusive on the Tuskegee syphilis study — where 600 Black men were left untreated for venereal disease for more than 40 years — national writer and visual journalist Breed interviewed Heller for video, text and photos, delivering an engaging narrative. Investigative intern Alyse Marin coproduced the compelling video featuring archival material and Breed’s interviews, including Heller and a descendant of one of the men in the study.Read more

Best of the Week — First Winner

Innovative AP team sheds light on methane ‘super emitters’ — invisible and virtually unregulated

It’s difficult to write a compelling story about a highly technical subject, harder still to produce a rich visual package on a literally invisible threat — but this all-formats AP team rose to the challenge, delivering an engaging package on “super emitters” 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 AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner honors.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Source work reveals canceled Philippines/Russia chopper deal

used deep sourcing among prominent Philippine officials to break an exclusive about a scrapped deal that would have had the country buying 16 Russian military transport helicopters.One of those government contacts tipped Gomez, AP’s chief Manila correspondent, that then-President Rodrigo Duterte had ordered cancellation of the $227 million purchase after Cabinet members warned him of potentially severe U.S. sanctions over such a deal with Russia. Gomez managed to buttonhole the former Philippines defense secretary at a U.S. Embassy reception, where the official confirmed the account, as did the country’s ambassador to Washington.Gomez’s reporting was hard to match; a major competitor ended up citing AP in its own version of the story.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: Rents spike as investors buy up mobile home parks

combined national reporting and analysis with strong on-the-ground journalism for a unique story exposing how institutional investors are buying up mobile home parks, then raising rents to recoup their investments.Sparked by a tip, Casey identified a mobile home park in upstate New York where the mostly low-income and older residents have faced upkeep problems and repeated rent increases by corporate owners. Thompson visited the park to document residents’ concerns, while Casey worked his sources to illustrate how this is part of a larger trend that has hit parks across the country.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP investigation reveals childhood vaccine crisis in Venezuela

produced a distinctive, exclusive investigative story using data analysis and deep reporting to reveal that many Venezuelan children lack access to essential vaccines, putting the country among the world’s worst for inoculating children against potentially fatal diseases and leaving neighboring countries vulnerable to outbreaks.Data on vaccination rates is elusive in Venezuela, where institutions are shrouded in secrecy, corruption and bureaucracy. The country hasn’t published rates since 2015. But Garcia Cano, Caracas-based Andes correspondent, obtained rare government data from a source, as well as estimates from public health agencies, showing the vaccination crisis is growing.She also visited clinics, spoke with families and interviewed public health experts for a comprehensive look at the availability of vaccines in Venezuela’s unraveling health-care system.Read more