for breaking the news that a man promoted by President Donald Trump as an authority on voter fraud, and who was the source of a claim that 3 million illegal immigrants voted, was himself registered to vote in three states during the 2016 presidential election. http://apne.ws/2kNMmij
for an exclusive story saying Maryland's prison system would change procedures for notifying victims about inmate deaths. http://bit.ly/2dn6DKa
for reporting exclusively that a California inmate had become the first in the nation to receive state-funded sex reassignment surgery: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/apnewsbre...
visited Eutaw, Alabama, to better understand the issue of viability — a key word in the superheated debate over abortion — as experienced by families who know what it means to have a baby born at the edge of life.Ungar, who has covered maternal and newborn health for years, knew doctors were getting better at keeping very premature babies alive. She reviewed data and research, interviewed physicians and was connected to Michelle Butler who was in just her fifth month of pregnancy when she she gave birth to twins, including Curtis, the world’s earliest surviving premature baby.Butler let the all-formats team of Ungar, Wang and Dill into family’s life. What emerged was an emotional narrative of extreme joy and profound loss, explaining the science and ethics involved and bringing deeply reported, balanced, real-world context to one of the biggest, most provocative issues of the year.Read more
for their work showing that dozens of states are expected to consider legalizing sports betting this year. An AP analysis shows that they should not expect it to provide a windfall for their budgets. http://bit.ly/2Tq6JDE
teamed up, using creativity, tenacity and multiformat collaboration to bring a fresh perspective to a widely covered natural phenomenon happening every 17 years.Borenstein, an AP science writer, had done cicada stories before and knew the timing would be tricky. The bugs emerge only when the temperature is right, usually in mid-May. He and Ritzell, an animator and video journalist on the Health and Science team, began hours of Zoom interviews with bug scientists in mid-March.Meanwhile, Washington-based photographer Carolyn Kaster made it her mission to document the bugs she called “beautifully weird.” She had first encountered the Brood X cicadas 17 years ago in Pennsylvania and knew they would be a challenging subject — if she could find them. Kaster reached out to an EPA scientist and photographed undergraduate students who were sticking thermometers into the ground to find the places where cicadas would soon be emerging. She found some nymphs that she photographed as they matured, and for a week she went out every night looking for mature bugs and their telltale red eyes.Adding a key element, Health & Science video journalist Kathy Young and Ritzel produced an animated video explainer on the life cycle of cicadas. The animation, guest-narrated by Allen Breed, was built around the colorful soundbites of a University of Maryland entomologist describing the cicadas’ life cycle.The team’s all-formats package was timed perfectly, just as the bugs were starting to emerge in some places. Borenstein and Kaster followed up several days later with an illustrated FAQ explainer on cicadas.The package created buzz on social media and was among the week’s most-viewed stories on AP News, while the animation and the newsroom video were used globally, including South Korea and India among others.https://aplink.news/pjlhttps://aplink.video/vkphttps://aplink.news/0ab
In a textbook display of outstanding source work and planning, Eric Tucker and Matthew Lee acted on a tip to score a massive scoop on a stunning U.S.-Russia prisoner exchange that happened despite heightened tensions between the countries.
In the process, the pair showed the rewards of careful, long-term source-building, a model of how to prepare in all formats to put the AP ahead of the competition the moment the news broke, and examples of how to build on a big story with smart sidebars in-cycle and a compelling follow-up story that offered new, behind-the-scenes details.
Their efforts paid off handsomely on Wednesday when Lee got the green light that the exchange had taken place, allowing AP to push out an alert and full story accompanied by photos and video, well before any Western media competitors were even aware the swap had happened.
For their exhaustive, comprehensive work that scooped everyone on the surprising swap, Tucker and Lee share AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner honors.
exposed a growing housing crisis hitting college campuses across the U.S.: A surge in the number of new students who deferred college during the worst of the COVID crisis has strained campus housing nationwide, leaving many students homeless, sleeping in cars or living in motel rooms while attending school — or causing them to further delay their education.Working with AP’s housing coverage team, San Francisco reporter Har found that while the college housing crunch may be most acute in California, it impacts college students nationwide.With video from Terry Chea and photos by Eric Risberg, digital storyteller Samantha Shotzbarger created a strong presentation that performed well both on AP platforms and with customers, but its real impact was on Facebook, where it was viewed 2.4 million times.Read more
for dogged source work and thorough reporting to confirm the growing number of sexual misconduct accusers against the late Ohio State team doctor, Richard Strauss, Franko has covered the scandal from the beginning and has deep sources, but nailing down the number of accusers has been difficult. Because the lawyers have been tight-lipped about the mediation process, Franko stayed in touch with some of the plaintiffs even if they would talk only off the record. The subject of the growing number of accusers came up during one such conversation, and Franko started checking with some of the lawyers to confirm it. She learned enough to prep a draft story, and when she finally got multiple confirmations and comment, she had the story ready to roll out: More than 300 accusers have come forward. The APNewsBreak was used by the hometown Columbus Dispatch and received wide play online with solid engagement on social media. https://bit.ly/2MFdD8F
delivered a distinctive accountability story, finding that U.S. governors’ promises to produce personal protective gear domestically remain unfulfilled, despite tens of millions in taxpayer money to support the proposals.Missouri-based state government reporter Lieb identified at least $125 million in PPE production grants to more than 300 business in 10 states but found that most of the companies were leaving the business because they couldn’t find buyers. Company executives told Lieb that production was again going overseas, potentially putting U.S. supplies of protective gear at risk in a future pandemic.Read more
used the power of the AP to highlight an almost unfathomable fact – the federal government and many states have not publicly tracked coronavirus infections and deaths in individual nursing homes – and their story was followed very quickly by policy changes. A day after their story appeared, New York announced it would indeed release a list of individual nursing homes and how many deaths each one had. And less than a week later, the federal government announced it would begin the same process.https://bit.ly/2VRcP2Khttps://bit.ly/2yAhgaf
obtained data across the country to establish the continued popularity of homeschooling for American families — even as schools reopened and vaccines became widely available.Because the federal government does not have a current database of homeschooling numbers, Thompson built her own by reaching out to education departments in all 50 states for their data. She also interviewed families for their perspectives on homeschooling, and used her experience on the education beat to put the trend in the context of homeschooling regulation debates, concerns over neglected students and a broader decline of public school enrollment.Read more
In the wake of offensive and insensitive comments about victims of ex-sports doctor Larry Nassar, calls for the resignation or firing of interim Michigan State University President John Engler reached a crescendo.
As the fast-moving story developed, multiple outlets cited anonymous sources in reporting his imminent departure, but Detroit reporter Corey Williams and Lansing, Michigan, correspondent David Eggert scored significant beats on the story, all of them solidly sourced.
Williams successfully reached two MSU trustees – one who said the board had the votes to oust Engler and another saying he was expected to resign later that day, while Eggert contacted Rachael Denhollander, the first victim of Larry Nassar to have gone public, for exclusive early reaction.
And finally, working his sources, Eggert exclusively obtained a copy of Engler’s 11-page resignation letter, which the university’s board was refusing to release. The AP was alone with the letter for at least an hour, posting the document online so we could link to it from our breaking story.
The AP’s story and reporting were widely used, including by The Detroit News – where Engler’s offensive comments had appeared, setting the series of events in motion.
For solid on-the-record reporting that put the AP far ahead on a highly competitive story, Williams and Eggert win this week’s Best of the States.
for leading an AP review across 50 state capitols showing that even though women made historic gains in state legislatures in 2018, men still hold the vast majority of top leadership roles. https://bit.ly/2MIgafu
for dominating global coverage with their video and stories on the renewed offensive against west Mosul in Iraq. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f084b4f094f440058e6...
teamed up to reveal where Black people in the United States are growing in number and where their population is shrinking. Tareen a Chicago-based race and ethnicity writer, and Schneider, an Orlando, Florida-based census writer, reported a pair of telling stories: one that found Black residents have been leaving some of the nation’s largest cities for the suburbs, and another about Black growth in less-congested cities with lower profiles.The stories, elevated by the work of photographers Huh and Otero in Chicago and Dallas respectively, complemented each other but also stood on their own as strong enterprise work. Other news organizations had done their own stories on Black population trends, but none with the depth and range of the AP package. Read more
leveraged years of source building and evenhanded reporting on opioid litigation in the U.S., securing rare access in all formats to an unprecedented federal court hearing in the most high-profile opioids case in the U.S.In the virtual hearing, people who had become addicted to opioids, and the parents of children lost to addiction, would finally confront members of the family that owned Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin. Mulvihill overcame federal court restrictions to get full access to the Zoom link for the hearing, and he leaned on his relationship with victims’ attorneys to have a multiformat team at a law firm as victims made emotional statements to members of the Sackler family. Read more
Sara Cline documented how liberal cities from Seattle to Austin, Texas, to New York, are taking a far more aggressive approach in dealing with homelessness as they emerge from the pandemic.Cities that for years tolerated tent encampments in public parks and public spaces are responding to fed-up business owners and residents who say the levels of street disorder are too high. But people who work with the unhoused say newly elected mayors are targeting a vulnerable population to score political points, rather than dealing with the underlying issues of addiction and housing affordability.Cline, a Portland, Oregon-based Report For America AP fellow, worked with staff photographers Ted Warren in Seattle and Rich Pedroncelli in Sacramento, California, to document the increased camp sweeps and to highlight the issues of people living on the street. Her story was one of only two non-Ukraine stories in AP’s top 10 for reader engagement over the weekend. Read more
It’s no secret that the repeal and replacement of Obamacare could have a significant impact both on those holding insurance and on the finances of states that have embraced the health care law. But over the last few months, few details had emerged on what that precise impact might be.
In an “Only on AP” story, St. Paul, Minnesota, statehouse reporter Kyle Potter revealed that Minnesota officials were bracing for additional costs that could reach $6 billion by 2029 to maintain a low-income health care program that covers more than 900,000 state residents. For providing one of the first concrete glimpses into the possible ramifications states envision, Potter wins this week's Best of States recognition.
for an AP analysis that identified $1.2 billion in estimated damage from the flooding and severe weather that affected roughly half the states this year, while also finding that many Midwest states are starting to pour tens of millions of dollars into protections against flooding that is expected to become more frequent and destructive as global temperatures rise. Lieb developed his damage figure by contacting the relevant official in every state that has experienced major flooding or severe storms this year, putting a fresh take on a topic that, when the flooding was occurring, was among the biggest stories in the U.S. https://bit.ly/2TpSi3D