for being first to report that workers at the Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., had voted against forming a union â one of two scoops on the day of the vote. http://bit.ly/2vP349F
for his work to broadcast President Donald Trumpâs 2020 re-election bid rally live and uninterrupted. Replogle had arranged with local tech organizers to secure a fiber line for AP, an investment that paid off when the satellite pool signal went down, leaving the networks and competitive agencies in the dark. ABC live channel turned to us for the remainder of the rally, and APâs on-site Global Media Services (GMS) clients had a continuous feed. https://bit.ly/2NrVbSi
A tweet was the seed for this illuminating story. âMost people in my rural, Appalachian hometown are being radicalized at church by their pastor, which is the person they trust the most,â it read. APâs Global Religion team ran with it.
Reporter Luis Andres Henao and visual journalist Jessie Wardarski visited the parishioners of three churches in Bluefield, West Virginia, including one pastor who had attended the Jan. 6 Washington rally that degenerated into a riot. The AP pair spent weeks convincing him to sit down for an interview. The result was an all-formats package of diverse congregations seeking common ground, even as they are divided on the role of evangelical Christianity in American politics.
For applying gentle persuasion and balanced reporting to produce a nuanced look at religion and politics in one West Virginia town, Henao and Wardarski win this weekâs Best of the States award.
for capturing emotional images of Gov. Dannel Malloy announcing unexpectedly that he would not seek reelection. The photos widely used on membersâ front pages and websites http://bit.ly/2obtW1i
The Womenâs March shortly after Donald Trumpâs inauguration energized its backers with a message to get politically engaged. The emergence of the #MeToo movement later that year provided even more momentum. But would women follow through? At the start of 2018, a midterm election year, the state government and data teams decided to find out.
The goal was ambitious: Track every woman running for Congress, statewide office and state legislature in the country, get historical numbers for comparison and follow their electoral fates through Election Day to see if the movements had led to real change. That effort, which will be ongoing throughout the year, produced its first scoop last week when AP declared a record number of women running for the U.S. House of Representatives.
For breaking significant news on one of the most dominant political trends of the year, state government team reporters Christina Cassidy and Geoff Mulvihill, and data team visual journalist Maureen Linke share this weekâs Best of the States.
When investigating politicians, the adage goes, âfollow the money.â But it is equally important to follow the meetings.
The sensational news about a campaign-season meeting involving a Russian lawyer and Donald Trumpâs inner circle â including his son, Donald Trump Jr. â developed over six days, with details and accounts changing almost by the hour. Reports trickled out that another man also was at the meeting to represent Russian interests.
With all major news organizations in hot pursuit, Washingtonâs Desmond Butler was the first to nail the identity of the lobbyist in question and also to nab the first on-the-record interview with him. For tenacious source work, Butler wins Beat of the Week.
Rolled out over the week of Jan. 6, AP's one-year anniversary coverage of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol stood out in a highly competitive field, with exclusive content across text, photos and video, including an interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Weeks of preparation and reporting paid off in broad, deep, insightful coverage. Among the offerings: lawmakers recounting their experiences inside the Capitol on the fateful day, a profile of protester Ashli Babbitt, AP staffersâ first-person accounts of covering the riot, the stubborn hold of conspiracy theories, teachers around the country debating how to teach the event, and much more.
Photos and video were no less compelling, highlighted by the exclusive and widely used on-camera interview of Pelosi, who chose to sit down with AP rather than the networks on the eve of the anniversary.
For demonstrating the APâs ability to deliver best-in-class content across platforms on this major anniversary, the team behind the Jan. 6 coverage is APâs Best of the Week â First Winner.
How is it that Republicans and Democrats can split the vote about equally in races for Congress and state legislatures, yet the GOP wins significant majorities in the House of Representatives and in statehouses across the country? Partisan gerrymandering, which manipulates legislative districts for one partyâs benefit, has been suspected, but there has been no way to actually quantify it â until now.
An Associated Press team of David Lieb, Meghan Hoyer and Maureen Linke, applying a new statistical method that calculates partisan advantage, analyzed U.S. House and state legislative races across the country last year and found that redistricting controlled by Republicans had given their party a distinct advantage and one that will be hard for Democrats to overcome in upcoming election cycles.
Their multi-format report â including easy-to-grasp interactives and a trove of localized data â is the Beat of the Week.
Republicans in Wisconsin had pledged that no eligible voter would be disenfranchised when they passed a strict voter ID law in 2011. After it was used for the first time last year in a presidential election, a group of AP reporters sought to put that promise to the test.
Weeks of research and source work led them to a retired Milwaukee resident who had voted for years and brought to the polls her Social Security card, Medicare card and county-issued bus pass with photo ID; a Navy veteran whose Illinois driver's license was good enough to board a plane and open checking account; an 85-year-old man who had voted in the same small town for years; and a recent college graduate who went to the polls with her three forms of identification â her student ID, copies of her lease and utility bill, and her ID from her home state of Ohio.
In the end, all were turned away or had to cast provisional ballots that were never counted.
For exposing the practical effects of the ID law on Wisconsin citizens, the team of Cassidy, Moreno and Antlfinger wins this week's Best of the States award.
This week two distinctly different bodies of work share APâs 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 nationâs 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 â the remote source of the Ganges â 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 APâs Best of the Week award.
overcame a beating at the hands of police and an internet blackout to deliver compelling footage and images, including exclusive interviews, throughout the disputed Belarus presidential election. When the state-run exit poll was announced after the vote, showing longtime authoritarian president President Alexander Lukashenko with 80% of the vote, thousands took to the streets. They were met with force by riot police as the government shut down the internet and tried to close the country off from the rest of the world. Video journalist Mstyslav Chernov was among those beaten and detained as police clashed with protesters.Despite the obstacles, AP outperformed the competition, working around the blackout to transmit strong all-formats coverage to the world ahead of other agencies.https://bit.ly/31PWEWahttps://bit.ly/2DCMZKNhttps://bit.ly/2XSMuCYhttps://bit.ly/3kysJdT
broke the news: After redistricting, hundreds of early voters in Nashville, Tennessee, were sent to the wrong congressional districts, jeopardizing election integrity. The first sign of trouble came when Kruesi was given conflicting information from state and local election officials about where she was supposed to vote, after Republicans redistricted the left-leaning city in hopes of flipping a Democratic seat.Nashville writers Kruesi and Matisse started reporting on the mixup and alerted election officials, who scrambled to fix the problem while confirming that more than 430 votes were cast in error; a lawsuit prompted by APâs reporting said the number could ultimately reach into the thousands.Read more
On the news-heavy weekend between impeachment and inauguration, Lolita Baldor broke a story that became the dominant item for news organizations across platforms: Top military officials feared insider attacks from National Guardsmen activated to protect the inauguration, prompting the FBI to vet all 25,000 troops sent to the city.
And officials werenât whispering their concerns anonymously; Baldor quoted the Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy. That was no fluke; Baldor has built trust with McCarthy and other top officials at the Pentagon. The Army granted her exclusive, off-the-record access to an inaugural planning session, then arranged on-the-record interviews with a number of leaders.
Baldorâs scoop immediately lit up social media and was picked up by some 330 news outlets, including networks and major publications.
For impressive source work that produced a major scoop in the intensive buildup to the inauguration, Baldor wins APâs Best of the Week award.
âWho do you believe?â
In the defining moment of the US-Russia summit in Helsinki, President Donald Trump stood side-by-side with Russia's Vladimir Putin and appeared to side with Russian denials when asked whether Moscow meddled in the 2016 election.
The crystal-clear question came from AP White House reporter Jonathan Lemire, who asked Trump to choose between Putin and his own intelligence agencies.
The exchange, and an equally bold couple of questions to Putin, was the capstone of a grueling weeklong reporting effort by Lemire and fellow White House reporter Jill Colvin as they chronicled Trumpâs tumultuous travels across Europe. The two, working in cooperation with colleagues in Europe and Russia, delivered smart spot reporting and strong enterprise at every stop on the presidentâs jaw-dropping trip.
For their exhaustive and highly impactful work, they win Beat of the Week.
President Donald Trump has long asserted that his tax cuts and other policies would accelerate job growth, which, in turn, would serve the âforgottenâ men and women who had helped propel him to the White House in the 2016 election.
Washington, D.C.-based economics reporter Josh Boak wondered: Had that actually occurred so far? And how much was job growth a motivating force for Trump supporters?
Boak hit on a possible way to hold the presidentâs claims to a fair test. He turned to a relatively obscure report issued by the governmentâs Bureau of Labor Statistics, then merged those economic figures with the APâs 2016 election returns, broken down by county.
The result, under multiple calculations, was clear: The bulk of U.S. hiring under Trump had so far occurred in Democratic counties.
Boak then spent three days in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, an area that had voted decisively for Trump and had lost jobs in the past 12 months. He reported that Republican voters appeared to be motivated more by social issues â opposition to gun control, for example. âOur No. 1 motivating factor,â the county Republican chairman told Boak, âis Second Amendment issues.â
For exclusively documenting how job growth under Trump has disproportionately underserved his geographic base and for illustrating that trend in a community that reflects it, Boak earns this weekâs Best of the States award.
Oklahomans widely assumed that 12 Republican state lawmakers who lost their bids for re-election came up short at the polls because of their opposition to raising pay for the stateâs public school teachers.
While opposition to education funding may have been one factor in incumbent losses in the GOP primaries, Oklahoma City-based reporter Sean Murphy began hearing scuttlebutt about an organized effort from within the Republican Party to kick out incumbents from their own party.
Using campaign finance reports and solid sourcing at the Capitol, Murphy was alone in showing that the rumors were true.
Public records showed a top state House GOP leader had given money to opponents of two of his own colleagues, and the opponents unseated the incumbents. Murphy also leveraged a relationship developed over years of reporting to get the lawmaker to talk. He acknowledged a plan to punish fellow Republicans for taking hardline stances that forced a compromise with Democrats on a plan to raise taxes to pay for teacher raises.
For combining shoe-leather reporting with smart document work, Murphy wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
While there is little dispute that Black voters pushed Joe Biden into the presidential winner's column, AP wanted to know: How big of a factor were they?
Race and ethnicity writers Kat Stafford and Aaron Morrison began reporting on what Black voters said they wanted Biden to deliver once in office. Using the voices they collected as the foundation of the story, Stafford and Morrison teamed with data journalist Angeliki Kastanis and polling journalist Hannah Fingerhut, who infused the piece with data and voter survey findings that bolstered the anecdotes with hard numbers.
Their collaboration put the AP days ahead of other news organizationsâ pieces on Black votersâ support of Biden. For resourceful and insightful reporting and analysis on a major factor in the 2020 election, the team of Stafford, Morrison, Kastanis and Fingerhut wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
âHi,â the email from Google began, before turning more ominous. âSomeone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account.â Change your password immediately, it urged, by clicking here. But the email wasnât actually from Google, and it wasnât sent randomly. It was from hackers connected to Russia who were targeting Hillary Clintonâs presidential campaign.
What eventually emerged from the successful hack â thousands of embarrassing emails from campaign chairman John Podesta and others â was widely reported in the summer and fall of 2016. But the anatomy of how that hack occurred had never been revealed, until now. That investigative story, by Raphael Satter, Justin Myers, Jeff Donn and Chad Day, and a companion piece about wider Russian efforts targeting an array of Kremlin opponents, is this weekâs Beat of the Week.
leveraged preparation, source reporting and probing questions to set the standard for coverage of President Donald Trumpâs COVID-19 diagnosis.APâs White House crew was already juggling news about a new Supreme Court nominee, revelations about Trumpâs tax records, a chaotic presidential debate and controversy over the presidentâs stand on white supremacy, when word came Thursday night that top adviser Hope Hicks had tested positive for the coronavirus. The reporting team sprang into action to develop the story and explore the implications for Trump and those around him. By 12:30 a.m., theyâd pushed the story as far as they could, and the White House gave no guidance on when test results for the president and first lady would be known.Colvin was still up, though, when Trump tweeted just before 1 a.m. that he and Melania had tested positive. The APNewsAlert moved at 1:02 a.m., and a full writethru packed with context â drawing heavily on APâs preparedness for just this scenario â was out a minute later, giving newspaper editors around the country time to frantically remake the next dayâs front pages. Over the next three days, through two dozen news alerts and more than 100 writethrus, the three reporters collaborated on sharp reporting and probing questions to tell the remarkable story of a president in both a health crisis and a credibility crisis of his own making. The teamâs work broke news and dominated play throughout the weekend. https://bit.ly/3d6bJIqhttps://bit.ly/36GP04thttps://bit.ly/3ntDyiEhttps://bit.ly/2SyroGX
