delivered multiformat coverage after an evangelical Christian revival meeting during school hours at a West Virginia high school led to a walkout by some students. By telling the story of the dissenting students, Charleston, West Virginia-based Willingham gave readers a nuanced story that avoided leaning into stereotypes of the Mountain State. Read More
teamed up to break the news that the U.S. Department of Justice is reversing course and is now âevaluatingâ opening sites for people to use heroin and other narcotics with protections against fatal overdoses.New York reporter Jennifer Peltz had pressed the DOJ for months before the department signaled it might be open to such sites, and lead DOJ reporter Balsamo used his extensive experience to expand on the departmentâs measured comments, which represent a drastic change from their hard-line stance in the Trump administration. Read more
joined forces to deliver an all-formats package on the unfolding crisis in Somalia, where severe drought is driving hunger-related deaths.Until this Only on AP story, media coverage of the drought in the Horn of Africa consisted largely of aid groupsâ dire warnings or isolated stories of grieving families, but little concrete information on how many people have begun to die. Nairobi-based correspondent Anna instead dug into unpublished humanitarian reports and coordinated with dedicated Mogadishu freelancers â correspondent Faruk, photographer Warsameh and video journalist Nor â producing a story that merges exclusive data on the mounting deaths with compelling personal accounts that put a human face on the crisis.Read more
A true multiformat team of AP journalists produced this Only on AP piece by tracking down data on child abuse from every state to reveal a worrying trend: Reports of abuse are down while signs of severity are up. The team complemented that dogged data work and hard news with the tragic story of one girl who fell through the cracks during the pandemic.
Acting on information sourced by video journalist Manuel Valdes, Seattle reporter Sally Ho coordinated the 50-state data survey and an ambitious analysis with data journalist Camille Fassett. Ho also read through hundreds of child abuse reports to find the case of 9-year-old Ava Lerario, killed by her father in a small Pennsylvania town. Ho worked with Philadelphia photojournalists Matt Rourke and Matt Slocum, and New York video journalist David Martin, to tell the story of about how the system failed Ava.
The teamâs deeply reported package drew remarkably high reader engagement, and many news outlets localized the work using APâs data distribution.
For exposing another disturbing inequality stemming from the pandemic, Ho and colleagues Valdes, Fassett, Rourke, Slocum and Martin share this weekâs Best of the States award.
Thereâs always a better story behind a statistic.
Chicagoâs homicide rate is one of the worst in the United States. By digging into one drive-by shooting, Chicago-based legal affairs reporter Michael Tarm and Houston-based video journalist John Mone found out how one victimâs life had inspired a generation of gang territory storytellers.
Telling it took a lot of sourcework.
Tarm had already been working on a story about social media and gangs, and heâd watched a few of Zack Stonerâs reports on Chicago street gangs and rappers on his ZackTV1 YouTube channel. When reports surfaced that Stoner was gunned down, Tarm began to look deeper, stumbling across a wider story â about a new brand of gutsy gangland reporters in Chicago and elsewhere who have avid followers on YouTube.
Getting access to the storytellers was tough, but eventually the name of Texas-based reporter Shawn Cotton emerged. Cotton was eager to discuss Stoner, his impact on the genre and the effect his killing had on him and others. Mone rode along with Cotton to the Meadow Brook subdivision in Fort Worth, dubbed âMurder Brookâ by some of the kids on the street where Cotton filmed.
The multi-platform work played prominently with impressive reader engagement.
For relentless sourcework to show how a generation of storytellers is impacting its communities, Tarm and Mone win this weekâs Best of the States.
For two years, as COVID-19 ravaged the world, AP health and science reporter Carla Johnson stayed in constant contact with disease modelers who were using careful analysis to predict what the coronavirus would do next.
This time her subject was the omicron wave â millions were infected and millions more had immunity through vaccination and/or past infection. Johnson knew those numbers might answer one of the most vexing questions of the pandemic: How much immunity had Americans developed from omicron?
Johnson leaned on her sources and asked one influential analyst to produce projections for the AP. The result was a key finding that gave the country the earliest and clearest sense yet of how the U.S. is navigating the pandemic: 73% of the country is believed to be protected from omicron.
Her deeply reported but straightforward story, explaining why future waves may be far less disruptive in the U.S., played widely with credit to APâs exclusive reporting.
For recognizing that the data might hold answers on COVID immunity, and resourceful source work that delivered a unique projection of future infection, Johnson is APâs Best of the Week â First Winner.
Earlier this year, states and cities across the country pleaded for a pandemic ârescueâ plan to avoid a fiscal cliff, and they got it: $350 billion from Washington for local and state governments. Five months later, AP State Government Team reporter David Lieb dug into the data, state by state, city by city. He found that states overall had spent just 2.5% of their initial allotment while large cities spent 8.5% â not such an emergency after all.
It was a dramatic finding from an ongoing series of accountability stories led by APâs state government and data teams tracking hundreds of billions of dollars in pandemic aid.
As Lieb gathered and analyzed the reports, data journalist Camille Fassett prepared the information for wider distribution to customers who used it for their own localized reporting.
Play for the story was outstanding. It landed on the front pages of dozens of APâs biggest customers, online and print, and drew readership on AP News. For distinctive accountability journalism that delivered on both the national and local level, Lieb and Fassett earn APâs Best of Week â First Winner.
"It was a mixed-up jumble of corpses piled on top of each other."
That was how a Rohingya Muslim survivor described the horrific scene of a mass grave in the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin. Faces of the victims appeared mutilated, possibly with acid. The survivor said he recognized his friends only by the colors of their shorts.
AP Seoul bureau chief Foster Klug, along with photographer Manish Swarup and videojournalist Rishabh Jain, both of New Delhi, were able to find evidence of five previously unreported mass graves in the village. With interviews, video they secured from someone who had been on the scene after the killings and satellite imagery, the reporting pointed to a systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim civilians by the military, with help from Buddhist neighbors.
For their exclusive package that detailed previously uncovered evidence of an atrocity, Klug, Swarup and Jain share Beat of the Week.
for being first to report that a Bureau of Land Management agent, previously being sued over his role in an artifacts-looting raid, is also accused of obtaining rare stones called moqui marbles from an evidence room and handing them out "like candy" to friends and business associates. http://wapo.st/2vJ6sQH
Itâs a difficult thing, interviewing people about their desolation. But an Associated Press team went to Grays Harbor County, Washington, and came away with a deeply reported portrait of a place that had voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1932, but placed a bet on Donald Trump in November as its rescuer from addiction and economic malaise.
Sensitively and penetratingly, the team of Claire Galofaro, David Goldman and Martha Irvine used text, photos and video to tell the tale of an old logging county that âanswered Donald Trump's call to the country's forgotten corners.â A half-year into the Republicanâs term, they found varying degrees of faith in his ability to make a difference in their lives.
The latest installment in the APâs Trump Country series is the Beat of the Week.
Statehouse reporters know to follow the money, that to hold government accountable we need to know where taxpayer money goes and how it is used. Nevada temporary legislative reporter Alison Noon did just that recently and helped bring about a promised change in policy that will make the workings of the state capital more transparent.
Noon first began reporting a story that rural health clinics offering family planning services to low-income women had slashed services and were turning women away for lack of funding after federal grant money dried up.
In the course of her reporting, Noon learned the programâs federal funding had been cut after a scathing federal review that showed widespread mismanagement and poor medical practices at the rural clinics. That highly critical federal report went unmentioned when the programâs administrator sought additional state funds during the legislative session.
Noon set out to learn why. She found Nevada did not require state administrators to share the results of such federal reviews with anyone â not the governor, not department heads, not state auditors. Her reporting led to a recently proposed requirement that such reviews be shared with Nevada auditors.
For her unmatched APNewsBreak, Noon wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
for showing that Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens failed to report that his campaign obtained a donor list from a charity he had founded to help military veterans. Greitens was fined as a result of the story. http://apne.ws/2pL697T
While books and movies have shed light on the world of big-time amateur basketball, no one has published stories along the way â until now. With the first story in a series, Detroit sportswriter Larry Lage and others in a team from Sports established AP as the authority on news about Emoni Bates, a 13-year-old who stands at 6-foot-7, just started the eighth grade and is primed to be the biggest basketball prospect in the United States. The goal is to understand the high-pressure world of college basketball recruiting by following a single promising playerâs path.
Lage, hybrid video journalist Mike Householder and photographer Paul Sancya of Detroit reported with the specific intent of presenting the stories in multiple ways, then worked with Chicago sports writer Jim Litke and east regional sports editor Oskar Garcia to craft the hub presentation of the text, photos, video and audio.
For their strong, revealing work, Lage, Householder, Sancya and Litke share this weekâs Best of the States prize.
Some stories just stick with a journalist. For AP investigative reporter Jason Dearen, a sparse 2015 announcement â three currrent or former Florida prison guards, identified by the FBI as Ku Klux Klansmen, had been arrested for plotting a former inmateâs murder â sparked a yearslong reporting effort.
Dearenâs big break came last summer when trial transcripts revealed an FBI informant was the star witness against the KKK members, his secret recordings providing a rare, detailed look at the inner workings of the klan cell and the domestic terrorism probe. Dearen and visual journalist David Goldman retraced the klansmenâs steps through Palatka, Florida, then producers Marshall Ritzel, Samantha Shotzbarger and Peter Hamlin stepped in to create a riveting online presentation.
The resulting all-formats package had immediate impact, with Florida papers featuring it on home pages and front pages, and prompting calls for investigations into white supremacy among prison workers. The story found 360,000 readers on AP News and kept them there for an average of more than five minutes â longer than any other AP story in memory.
For dogged reporting and an immersive all-formats narrative that exposes a salient, timely issue, Dearan, Goldman, Ritzel, Shotzbarger and Hamlin win APâs Best of the Week award.
for all-formats coverage on the issue of immigration with a unique package that explores the toll of deportations on âmixed-statusâ families. https://bit.ly/2ObVYD7
The nationâs health isnât improving. In some key measures, itâs getting worse. How is that even possible in an era of genetic medicine and other advances? And how could the AP connect that story to our customersâ own neighborhoods?
AP medical writer Mike Stobbe and data journalist Nicky Forster started with those questions and delivered a winning package on why American life expectancy is getting shorter.
The package ran shortly after the release of the CDCâs annual mortality report which found that U.S. life expectancy had declined again. To find out what was behind the numbers, Stobbe returned to West Virginia, a place he declared the unhealthiest place in America 10 years ago. He connected with people trying to get healthier, witnessed the headwinds of the opioid crisis and explained how difficult it is to improve health en masse.
Forster, meanwhile, assembled an array of data that explained what was happening around the U.S. He matched longevity estimates for more than 65,000 neighborhoods with demographics, and found striking connections to income, race and education. He then built an interactive that allowed readers to see life expectancy in their own neighborhood and wrote a sidebar on the APâs findings.
For getting beyond the numbers for a richer understanding of why American lifespans are shrinking, and giving AP customers the data to localize their stories, Stobbe and Forster win the weekâs Best of the States award.
When the first murder conviction came down in the closely watched trial of three men accused in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, APâs news alert rocketed out a stunning nine minutes ahead of competitors. Savannah, Georgia, correspondent Russ Bynum anchored that coverage on the final day as he had single-handedly for weeks, writing thousands of words over the course of the trial.
His deep knowledge of the complex case was key to preparing for the potential verdicts. Bynum and team had a plan in place: AP would send out an alert as soon as a first murder conviction came down, rather than wait for verdicts on all three defendants. That decision gave AP the edge over news organizations that waited for all the verdicts to be read, and no doubt contributed to APâs overall dominance of the story.
The verdicts were followed with analysis, explainers and enterprise. AP also produced 13 video edits on the final day and captured telling photos inside the courtroom before, during and after the convictions.
Bynum was at the heart of APâs collaborative effort. For his fierce dedication to the case, Russ Bynum earns APâs Best of the Week â First Winner honors.
for years of beat work and shoe leather reporting on the cityâs former police chief and his wife, a powerful city prosecutor. The couple now faces trial on corruption charges as prosecutors say they paid for their lavish lifestyle by lying, stealing and cheating their family and clients. Kelleherâs intimate knowledge of the case enabled her to set up the trial in a way no other media could match. https://bit.ly/2Wkq76E
As tensions between Iran, its neighbors and the United States ratcheted up last week, APâs staff in Baghdad, Dubai and Tehran turned out aggressive, yet cautious coverage, bringing facts and unique perspectives to the tense and escalating situation in the Persian Gulf, often well ahead of the competition.
Those stories included reports of âsabotagedâ oil tankers off the coast of the UAE, and AP broke the news that Iran had quadrupled its uranium enrichment.
Meanwhile, APâs Tehran team produced an all-formats piece on the mood of people on the cityâs streets that could not be matched by competitors, and AP was first to report an FAA warning that Iran could misidentify commercial flights in the region.
AP was also aggressive on related developments, ensuring that clients had video and text coverage of tweets by President Donald Trump and Iranian officials.
For smart judgment, planning and effective use of APâs resources to break news and bring facts to a region on edge, the team of Jon Gambrell, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Mehdi Fattahi, Bassem Mroue, Nasser Karimi and Vahid Salemi wins AP's Best of the Week, with the support of their colleagues and contributors in the region.
for fast work that made AP first to confirm, report on and shoot video and photos on the day that Rio councilwoman Marielle Franco, an outsider politician and fierce critic of police brutality, was gunned down. https://yhoo.it/2HUgO5S