for an exclusive interview with William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that revealed the Fed will likely pare its bond portfolio and raise interest rates this year. AP also published a 6,100-word transcript. http://bit.ly/2vy0y7t
for uncovering a new program that allows Palestinians to clear their records with Israeli security officials in exchange for information about friends, relatives or neighbors. https://bit.ly/2Ibrpd5
for combining to deliver exclusive live video, photos and text from the scene immediately after a US-Bangla Airlines crash that killed 49 people. https://bit.ly/2u9oBLh
for revealing that the Gulf nation of Qatar, which has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel, was quietly bankrolling a series of large-scale development projects in the Gaza strip, requiring its covert cooperation with Israel. http://bit.ly/2HhXekB
"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.
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 – 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.
As he geared up to cover Sunday’s 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 Brady’s 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 week’s Best of the States prize.
for their vivid reconstruction of a massacre of dozens of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. http://bit.ly/2F3x83x
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 week’s Best of the States prize.
“Hi,” the email from Google began, before turning more ominous. “Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account.” Change your password immediately, it urged, by clicking here. But the email wasn’t actually from Google, and it wasn’t sent randomly. It was from hackers connected to Russia who were targeting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
What eventually emerged from the successful hack – thousands of embarrassing emails from campaign chairman John Podesta and others – 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 week’s Beat of the Week.
for an all-formats exploration of the thousands of deaths of Nepali migrant workers in recent years. http://apne.ws/2ikIxjP
For weeks, the escalating back-and-forth between North Korea and the United States over possible nuclear conflict had made for headlines that were alarming at the least _ and to many, terrifying.
Amid all the bluster came an exclusive report from Matthew Pennington, foreign policy reporter in Washington, revealing that senior U.S. and North Korean diplomats have been maintaining a back-channel communication for the last several months, and that they'd moved on from an early focus on U.S. detainees to address the broader strains in the relationship.
At a time of heightened alert, the story pointed to a possible diplomatic path out of the crisis, and indicated that both U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be more flexible on the idea of negotiations than they are letting on. After days of bombastic threats from both sides, Pennington's reporting, which wins the Beat of the Week, provided a sobering reality check: the enemies aren't on an unavoidable path toward conflict.
After the U.S. Supreme Court told states that juveniles who had been given mandatory life without parole sentences should get the chance to argue for their release, national writers Sharon Cohen and Adam Geller wanted to know how judges, prosecutors, lawmakers and parole boards were dealing with the inmates.
Aided by reporters in all 50 states, their exhaustive investigation showed for the first time that the high court’s mandate in 2016 to give inmates a chance at freedom is being applied inconsistently, varying from state to state, even county to county, “in a pattern that can make justice seem arbitrary.”
The resulting three-day series featured deeply reported text stories, an expansive photo report of inmates from across the country, a 16-minute audio extra, a video animation on teen brain development, a video story, and a searchable trove of state-by-state details – all hosted in a dynamic hub on APNews.com.
Cohen and Geller’s work wins this week’s Beat of the Week prize.
for being the first to report the rules governing who would be barred from entering the United States after the Supreme Court allowed President Trump's travel ban to go into effect in modified form. https://apnews.com/9c3d06565daf40cc86f0f80f5ad0eff...
It began with a photograph showing one of the London Bridge attackers lying dead with a police officer standing over him. The Associated Press had bought it from a freelancer and now wanted to interview him. When it proved difficult to reach him by phone, AP producer Natalia Gohl friended him on Facebook and discovered something even more extraordinary: nine minutes of harrowing video of police hunting for the attackers that he streamed live during the assault.
Gohl’s discovery – the feed was private and had only a few hundred views – and the intense negotiations that followed to obtain the video led to a global exclusive. It is the Beat of the Week.
for finding that an unusual spike in worldwide Facebook “likes” for the Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Olympics came from places like Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. https://yhoo.it/2otCxe4
It began as an anniversary story, but one that would break news. With North Carolina’s hotly-contested “bathroom bill,” HB2, in place for nearly a year, AP’s Raleigh bureau was asked by the South Desk to assess the economic impact of the law limiting protections for the LGBT community.
Reporters Jonathan Drew and Emery Dalesio created a spreadsheet tallying the results of their digging, including searches of public records, among them previously unseen state calculations of lost business; they interviewed corporate leaders and state and local officials. And they were able to put a hard minimum figure on huge losses to the state economy even as legislators were negotiating a revision of HB2. “The deal was struck,” The New York Times noted, “days after The Associated Press reported that the backlash against the law would cost North Carolina at least $3.7 billion in business over 12 years.”
The timely exclusive by Drew and Dalesio is the Beat of the Week.
for investigating Texas' $1.6 million contract with an anti-abortion group and finding the state didn't get its money's worth; the state’s House ethics chairwoman launched an investigation. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f7645d59944d47228f2...
for following up on an earlier investigation and showing that Hawaii may have been breaking its own laws for years by allowing thousands of foreign workers to catch and sell seafood as part of the state’s fishing industry, worth $110 million a year. https://www.apnews.com/c17b1543c8294a40902aeeff608...
Remember these images from the Inauguration: The new first couple dancing across a giant presidential seal at a ball? Faces in the crowd cheering or crying in the rain? The instant when Donald Trump took in the scene through an opening door before stepping onto the podium to become the 45th U.S. president?
Credit for those signature images, which appeared across the globe almost as they happened, goes to the skill and artistry of a hand-picked team of AP photographers and photo editors – and also to the cutting-edge, behind-the-scenes efforts of AP technicians working hand-in-hand with them to cover the intensely competitive event.
Their extraordinary work, a stream of 2,000 photos sent from daybreak until well after midnight, earns the Beat of the Week.
