for her detailed, on-the-record account of bullying and a death threat faced by a 12-year-old girl inside her middle school. https://bit.ly/2IL0JQW
When Carrie Fisher died, generations lamented the loss of their Princess Leia. But when actress Debbie Reynolds died a day later, the near-simultaneous passings of mother and daughter were seen worldwide as an epic tragedy.
It was AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen who first reached Fisherâs brother, Todd, to confirm that his sister had been hospitalized. Days later, it was AP Television Writer Lynn Elber who first reached Todd Fisher to confirm the unthinkable -- that his mother had died, as well. Their sterling work is the Beat of the Week.
The auto industry and Hollywood entertainment could hardly be more different worlds. But for AP reporters covering them, they have this in common: Building sources is essential.
Last week, Tom Krisher, a Detroit-based auto writer, and Lynn Elber, the TV writer in Los Angeles, demonstrated the value of great beat reporting. Both scored scoops that left competitors scrambling. Their stories also created a very unusual situation: A tie for Beat of the Week honors.
Krisher was the first to report the U.S. government was taking the unusual step of allowing General Motors to delay a large recall of potentially defective air bags, giving the automaker time to prove the devices are safe and possibly avoid a huge financial hit.
Elber broke the news of the death of Florence Henderson, "The Brady Bunch" star, about an hour after the beloved TV mom passed away in Los Angeles.
for thinking to ask Matthew McConaughey at a red-carpet event about the just-announced death of fellow actor and friend Sam Shepard, and capturing McConaugheyâs stunned reaction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHMF4LlWgZI
for landing an exclusive telephone interview with a South Carolina prison inmate who calmly confesses his role in the deaths of four fellow prisoners. https://apnews.com/f939c602fe9f40e3a33ebe78331a08e...
for obtaining an exclusive interview with the new interim U.S. attorney for half of Pennsylvania about his son's heroin death, the first time the prosecutor had spoken publicly about the tragedy. http://bit.ly/2iJCUfS
put AP in front as the first international news organization to report the death of the second suspect in Canadaâs deadly stabbing rampage in and around a Saskatchewan Indigenous reserve. Within minutes of the first report of the suspectâs arrest, Gillies heard from a source that the man had died in police custody of a self-inflicted wound.Gillies, APâs Canada bureau chief, was ahead of Canadaâs major news organizations. Many outlets cited AP, and even Canadian Press reached out to ask who APâs source was, as journalists scrambled to confirm the highly competitive story.Read more
for being the first to get inside access to hospitals in Caracas for a powerfully reported story about unhealthy conditions. http://apne.ws/2dGMQsa
AP legal affairs reporter Michael Tarm witnessed 10 of the unprecedented 13 federal executions in the final months of the Trump administration, diligently taking notes on what he saw in the chamber, from the inmatesâ last words to their last breaths.
But weeks after the last execution in mid-January, something nagged at him: The executionerâs official account did not jibe with what he had observed during the execution. Tarm went back, looking through hundreds of filings and court transcripts. His reporting resulted in a stunning exclusive on how the executioners all used euphemisms like âsnoredâ and âfell asleepâ while Tarm and other witnesses saw inmatesâ stomachs dramatically shuddering and jerking in the minutes after lethal injections.
The sanitized accounts, Tarm realized, raised serious questions about whether officials misled courts to ensure the executions would be completed before Joe Biden, a death penalty foe, took office. His story — the latest exclusive in APâs coverage of the federal executions — received prominent play and reader engagement.
For backing up his own observations with rigorous reporting to hold the federal government accountable for its official accounts of the executions, Tarm earns this weekâs Best of the States award.
The U.S. surpassed a solemn milestone on Feb. 22 with 500,000 COVID-19 deaths — a moment in the pandemic that required thoughtful planning and storytelling, and precise execution across the AP for the coverage to stand out.
Editors began planning weeks in advance. They wanted impactful photo and video packages, lightning-fast spot coverage of the milestone being reached, and a text story to anchor the report that was different from APâs previous recognition of 100,000, 250,000 and 400,000 deaths.
The result was a package that resonated in all formats.
For meeting the grim milestone with compelling, comprehensive coverage, the team of Adam Geller, Jocelyn Gecker, Alyssa Goodman, Pete Brown, Eugene Garcia, Manuel Valdes and Krysta Fauria wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
âHere in the desert, Algeria has abandoned more than 13,000 people in the past 14 months, including pregnant women and children, stranding them without food or water and forcing them to walk, sometimes at gunpoint, under temperatures of up to 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit).â
With that chilling declaration, the AP opened a new chapter in the ongoing, global saga of migrant suffering. Reporter Lori Hinnant and visual journalists Jerome Delay and Bram Janssen revealed the Algerian governmentâs complicity in a horror that had gone unreported â and had led to the deaths of an unknown number of migrants. Their exclusive story is the Beat of the Week.
In February, Arkansas announced a series of April executions that, if carried out, would make history in the United States: Over an 11-day period, the state would put to death eight inmates â two each on four days. No state had performed so many executions in such a short time since the Supreme Court re-instated the death penalty in 1976.
And Arkansas, which had not carried out an execution since 2005, had a curious justification for the expedited timetable: the supply of one of its three execution drugs was expiring at the end of the month. Officials were not confident they could obtain more.
Weeks before the first planned execution, a team of AP journalists in Arkansas and beyond set out to both chronicle the executions and offer deep and varied enterprise that broke news. Their work earns this week's Best of States award.
produced an important collection of three multiformat stories bringing to light the decimation occurring in New Yorkâs Latino population, and especially the vibrant undocumented immigrant community that is among the most religious â but also the hardest hit segment during the pandemic.
The team first told the story of two congregations united in grief: Between them, the two churches have lost more than 100 members to the virus. They then took a poignant look at a priest who has endured the loss of his mentor, his father and congregation members. https://bit.ly/2ZksJpEhttps://bit.ly/3cW8ySQhttps://bit.ly/2LMVbZhhttps://bit.ly/3cTzenb
The AP team in London had been preparing its coverage of Prince Philipâs death for years to ensure when the moment came, everyone would be ready. That exceptional planning laid the foundation for lightning handling and a major win when Philip passed on Friday.
The preparation included multiple revisions of the main obituaries, filing plans for all formats and a strategy for how the newsroom and editorial support teams would communicate to customers. It all paid off on Friday when AP picked up rumors of Philipâs death. U.K. news director Susie Blann confirmed with her sources and immediately let the wider team know. When official word came via email from the palace, the all-formats coverage team of more than 25 individuals in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States was poised for action.
From the Flash alert two minutes after the email confirmation, AP was incredibly fast with the news: text, photos, live and edited video, all tailored to customers who depend on and expect this coverage when it matters.
For exceptional, nearly flawless performance across the AP on one of the biggest stories thus far this year, Susie Blann, Martin Cleaver, Bridget Jones, Anne Marie Belgrave, Samira Becirovic, Jill Lawless, Naomi Koppel, Danica Kirka, Sarah DiLorenzo and the international royal coverage team earn APâs Best of the Week honors.
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.
In the course of source-building in early 2016, northeastern Pennsylvania correspondent Michael Rubinkam had lunch with a local lawyer. The lawyer mentioned that a member of the U.S. attorney's office had lost a son to heroin but had never spoken publicly about it.
Intrigued, Rubinkam asked the lawyer to approach the then-assistant prosecutor, Bruce Brandler, about an interview. Rubinkam had been looking for fresh ways to write about the scourge of heroin, and saw the prosecutorâs story as a powerful new example of how no family is immune.
But Brandler, he learned, was adamantly against going public with his familyâs â and his sonâs â story. It was too painful.
for a collaborative effort that produced outstanding images and powerful storytelling surrounding Robert Mugabeâs death, and explored the hardships of the people he left in economic crisis.
The distinctive work done by APâs all-formats team in Zimbabwe was due in large part to the efforts of photographer Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi. His tireless negotiations with Zimbwabwean authorities over the preceding months meant AP staffers were already accredited to work in the country and could fly into Harare soon after news broke of Mugabeâs death. AP was reporting the story while other news organisations struggled to get into the country.
Mukwazhiâs persistent face-to-face contact with the information ministry was also crucial for obtaining press accreditation for Johannesburg-based Africa News Editor Andy Meldrum, APâs foremost expert on Zimbabwe, who had been on a blacklist for 16 years for his reporting on Mugabeâs rule. Meldrumâs personal reporting from the ground defined APâs coverage, while photo, video and text colleagues delivered comprehensive coverage ranging from the official funeral ceremonies to the daily life of Zimbabeans struggling to get by.https://bit.ly/2m2Hlbphttps://bit.ly/2m0JODehttps://apnews.com/RobertMugabe
With exceptional multiformat journalism, AP investigative reporters Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman exposed the collapse of the U.S. medical equipment supply chain that led to deadly shortages of crucial personal protective equipment during the pandemic.
In collaboration with public televisionâs âFrontline,â the Center for Global Reporting and AP reporters worldwide, âAmericaâs Medical Supply Crisisâ identified a series of missteps in the U.S. that contributed to one of the highest death rates per capita in the world.
The investigation elicited strong public engagement, praise from public health experts and response by bipartisan members of Congress.
For breaking down a complex topic to show the critical importance of medical supply chains and the human cost when those supply chains fail, Linderman and Mendoza share APâs Best of the Week award.
followed up on their exceptional initial work and continued their record-breaking coverage in the week leading up to the queenâs funeral, delivering outstanding all-formats journalism and giving clients an array of offerings from virtually every event and every perspective.APâs stories and visuals captured the pomp and ceremony, and the emotions of mourners lined up for many for hours to pay their respects as the queen lay in state. APâs stories ranged from a first-person account of waiting in that queue to how the queen set the stage for the transition to Charles to an evocative account inside Westminster Abbey during Mondayâs funeral â and much more.Coverage of the funeral itself saw stunning usage of APâs content, while the collective 12-day round-the-clock effort won near-unanimous praise from AP customers.Read more
From the very beginning of Jim Mustianâs stellar reporting on the death of Black motorist Ronald Greene, he has been driven by two main questions: What really happened to Greene on the night of his 2019 arrest? And was this a pattern of how Louisiana state troopers treated Black motorists?
Mustian answered the first last month when he obtained body camera video showing troopers stunning, choking, punching and dragging the unarmed Greene as he apologized and begged for mercy.
And he began answering the second this past week when he exclusively reported that the Louisiana State Police has convened a secret panel to investigate whether Troop F — the same unit involved in Greeneâs arrest — was systematically targeting other Black motorists. Mustianâs detailed reporting and solid sourcing turned up new cases and new video, and he landed the first-ever interview with one of the victims.
His scoop scored with heavy play and strong engagement. For dogged reporting to keep the AP ahead on a searing case of racial injustice and its continuing fallout, Mustian earns this weekâs Best of the States award.
