for breaking news on positive train control technology around the deadly crash of an Amtrak train south of Seattle. http://bit.ly/2qwoibn
for breaking the news that the Justice Department and FBI were missing five monthsâ worth of text messages from an agent who had been removed from Robert Muellerâs Russia investigation. http://bit.ly/2E8GCNl
Reporters Christopher Sherman, Martha Mendoza and Garance Burke were weeks into a deep look at police misconduct in Honduras, where public mistrust of law enforcement is among the highest in the world. So when they heard a new national police chief had been appointed, they immediately shifted gears and began asking questions about him.
What they found was explosive â a confidential government security document that detailed a troubling allegation regarding the force. It said the newly named National Police Chief Jose David Aguilar Moran had once helped a drug cartel leader pull off the delivery of nearly a ton of cocaine. The clandestine haul, worth at least $20 million on U.S. streets, was packed inside a tanker truck that, the report said, was escorted by corrupt police officers to the home of Wilter Blanco, a drug trafficker recently convicted in Florida and now serving a 20-year sentence.
For their dogged reporting, Sherman, Mendoza and Burke share the Beat of the Week.
Holding prominent officials accountable is one of the main missions of journalism, even if it is uncomfortable at times. APâs Nicole Winfield did just that, politely but firmly pressing Pope Francis on his knowledge of a sexual abuse scandal that has clouded his appointment of a Chilean bishop in 2015 and cast doubt about his commitment to fighting the problem.
AP Santiago correspondent Eva Vergara got the first part of the scoop for AP. She knew a letter she had spent months tracking down was toxic to Francis, to his upcoming trip to Chile, and to the Chilean bishop appointed by Francis and accused of covering up for the country's most notorious pedophile priest.
The letter showed that Francis knew that Bishop Juan Barros was accused of complicity in covering up the sexual abuse by Rev. Fernando Karadima, but appointed Barros bishop anyway. The scandal and Francis' subsequent accusations of slander against abuse victims dominated coverage. It led to Francis trying to explain himself under tough questioning by Winfield on an extraordinary in-flight press conference on his way home.
For Winfield's unflinching questioning of the pope, and Vergara's determined efforts to surface the letter that launched the story, the pair wins Beat of the Week.
As he geared up to cover Sundayâs AFC championship between the Jacksonville Jaguars and New England Patriots, Boston photographer Charlie Krupa knew the biggest national sports story of the week had been the mysterious practice injury to the throwing hand of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.
Krupa and every other photographer at the game made photos showing the bandaged hand as Brady warmed up, played, and celebrated yet another AFC championship on stage at midfield afterwards.
But after covering countless high-profile sporting events around the globe during his AP career, Krupa knew there was one more picture he needed to make.
When Brady took the podium for the post-game news conference, Krupa watched through the lens for that fleeting moment of Bradyâs unbandaged hand. His exclusive pictures, published on ESPN and Boston Globe websites, among others, confirmed Brady had sustained a cut at the base of his right thumb that required several stitches.
For journalistic tenacity and photographic skill that gave AP an exclusive beat, Krupa receives this weekâs Best of the States prize.
for breaking the news that the U.S. would withhold half of its first scheduled installment of money for the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees. http://bit.ly/2DAVhkY
for confirming that the warning of a ballistic missile headed for Hawaii was a false alarm. http://bit.ly/2mUtT78
for breaking the news that Trump would extend sanctions relief to Iran and not pull the U.S. out of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal. http://bit.ly/2CZZRcf
The source's message delivered by text was short and simple: "I have big news."
Sadie Gurman, a Justice Department reporter, had covered Colorado's first-in-the-nation pot experiment when she was a staffer in Denver, cultivating activists and law enforcement officials as sources. So when she transferred to Washington about a year ago, she had a burning question: When would Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a fierce opponent of decriminalization of marijuana, reverse the Obama administrationâs hands-off approach to states that have legalized the drug?
The answer came last week and Gurman had the scoop â long before the competition and hours ahead of the official announcement. Her story earns the Beat of the Week.
for completing the APâs yearlong âTrump Countryâ series with a story that spurred widespread discussion â returning to the roots of the presidentâs populist appeal. http://bit.ly/2BZ1eHO
When a Minnesota woman was preparing to meet the man who received her dead husbandâs face in a transplant operation, the hospital that performed the surgery â the Mayo Clinic â immediately recommended that The Associated Press be the news organization to tell their story.
In early 2016 AP national writer Sharon Cohen, video journalist Teresa Crawford and photographer Charlie Neibergall had been first with the tale of Andy Sandness and Calen âRudyâ Ross. The AP team's sensitive portrayal of two men who had each attempted suicide, with the one who lived (Sandness) ultimately receiving the face of the one who did not (Ross), had been well-regarded by Sandness and by Rossâ widow, Lilly.
In the months following, Mayo was besieged with requests from news outlets to cover the first meeting between Andy and Lilly, but when the pair began making plans to meet in fall 2017, they wanted only AP in the room.
For their exclusive coverage of that poignant meeting, Crawford, Neibergall and correspondent Kyle Potter win this weekâs Best of the States award.
for an AP investigation that found thousands more civilian deaths caused by the U.S.-led coalition in Mosul than earlier acknowledged. http://bit.ly/2phgQ3a
He was known as Mosul Eye, a blogger who for years was one of the worldâs main sources of news about Islamic State atrocities in his hometown of Mosul, Iraq. But the burden of anonymity was growing too heavy for him to bear.
He mentioned wistfully in messages to reporters Lori Hinnant and Maggie Michael that he missed his own name. Hinnant suggested he might want to think about revealing his identity, but let the subject drop. He agonized over when and how he would reveal it.
The when, it turns out, was Nov. 15, 2017. The how was in an interview to The Associated Press.
For bringing the world the story of Omar Mohammed, the mysterious historian-turned-blogger who risked his life to expose the horrors of Islamic State rule in Mosul, Hinnant and Michael win this weekâs Beat of the Week.
It began as an effort to find something new to say about a well-documented trend: the growing levels of racial segregation in American schools. Data journalist Larry Fenn, working with Ivan Moreno and the Education Beat Team, began analyzing enrollment data, looking for areas where segregation has become especially severe. Fenn spent long hours building the data set, both for AP reporting and for distribution to AP members.
What jumped out, in city after city, was the prevalence of charters among schools with the most extreme racial segregation. After months of analysis and reporting, AP revealed that fully 17 percent of charter schools nationally, or over 1,000 of them, have 99 percent minority enrollment.
Fenn's dataset for distribution to members had the most downloads and most unique users of any of AP's data offerings to date. For a project that led to record levels of engagement, Fenn and Moreno share this weekâs Best of the States prize.
Oil extracted from the tar sands of Canada has contributed to booming production among American refineries, but it also has created a messy legacy: Ton upon ton of a filthy byproduct called petroleum coke. U.S. utilities donât want it because of its extremely high sulfur content, leaving refineries with one option â getting rid of it â because stockpiling had stirred community outcries. Tammy Webber, a Chicago-based reporter with the environmental beat team, wondered: If refineries couldnât offload the substance in the U.S., what were they doing with it?
Through a yearâs worth of detective work, Webber and her beat team colleague in New Delhi, Katy Daigle, traced the shadowy network that trades in oil refineries' bottom-of-the-barrel leftovers. They found that India was the leading destination of âpetcokeâ from the U.S., and Indian officials had no idea the amount of petcoke flowing into the country was 20 times more than just six years before. Nor did they know how it was being used in a country already choking on some of the worldâs dirtiest air.
Within 24 hours of the story hitting the wire, Indiaâs government announced it would phase out imports of petcoke and had begun working on a policy to end the practice.
For revealing the secretive transport of petroleum coke from the U.S. to one of the worldâs most polluted countries, and for drawing an immediate reaction from the government of India, Webber and Daigle win this weekâs Beat of the Week.
for getting out first word of the dismissal of folksy humorist and radio man Garrison Keillor from Minnesota Public Radio. Keillor, the creator of âA Prairie Home Companion,â emailed Baenen with the news, âIâve been fired.â http://bit.ly/2nHRZoJ
How best to capture the story of recovering opioid users?
Chicago-based medical writer Lindsey Tanner and Atlanta-based photographer/videographer David Goldman teamed up to produce an intimate look at a diverse group of people â among them, a lawyer, a businessman and a trucker â who got caught up in the worst opioid epidemic in U.S. history.
Their illuminating package â combining Tanner's powerful text and Goldman's photos with a haunting mini-documentary â earns the Beat of the Week.
for uncovering news that associates of President Trump held a secret meeting in Moscow that investigators say may have been a strategy session to come up with an explanation for why Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner met with Russian nationals in New York a year earlier. http://bit.ly/2AYe4Ss
Brian Madeux made medical history on Nov. 13 when he became the first person to have his genes edited inside his body in an attempt to cure a genetic disease. And the Associated Press was the only news organization to document this experiment, which could advance medicine by giving a potentially safer, more precise and permanent way to do gene therapy.
Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione got word earlier this year that the gene editing work would soon begin. She negotiated exclusive rights to the story, giving AP sole access to the patient, doctors and scientists involved. She spent six months reporting the story, teaming with journalists in three cities through several false starts and twists and turns to deliver an all-formats package.
For their enterprising work on a groundbreaking story, the team of Marchione, Kathy Young, Terry Chea, Eric Risberg and Marshall Ritzel wins Beat of the Week.
For three months, Associated Press photographer Jae Hong traveled Americaâs West Coast to chronicle the regionâs exploding homeless crisis and do what many try to avoid: look into the eyes of the people living on the streets, in tents or in their vehicles and get to know them.
His series of intimate portraits focused on the subjectsâ eyes and were combined with short text stories to reveal their humanity, whether it was an aging, down-on-his-luck street performer on Los Angelesâ Skid Row or a 9-year-old boy who lives with his family in a rented RV blocks from Googleâs headquarters.
The unique portraits were one part of a larger package of images that Hong and his colleagues across the West â Ted Warren, Marcio Sanchez, Chris Carlson and Greg Bull â produced for a project looking at the roots of the homeless crisis in the region and identifying potential solutions.
For their work documenting the lives of the homeless, the team wins this weekâs Beat of the Week prize.
