scored a rare sit down, on-camera interview with International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva that broke news: She urged China to rethink its zero-COVID policy and said the U.S. Federal Reserve has to keep raising rates for the good of the global economy.
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turned seemingly mundane testimony of a legislative hearing into a timely scoop, breaking the news that the Food and Drug Administration had skipped nearly all its inspections of baby formula plants during the first year of COVID, likely contributing to the severe shortage of formula in the U.S. and raising questions about what the federal government could have done to prevent it.Using information he gleaned from Capitol Hill testimony by the three top baby formula manufacturers, Washington-based health writer Perrone identified the companiesâ plants in the FDAâs online database and discovered the agency hadnât inspected Abbottâs plant â responsible for a recall of formula that exacerbated the nationwide shortage â for two years between 2019 and 2021. In fact, the FDA later acknowledged only three of the nationâs 23 formula plants were inspected in the first year of the pandemic.Read more
scored their latest in a string of exclusives on the deadly 2019 arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene, finding that Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards watched a key video of Greene taking his final breaths â a full six months before prosecutors were aware the footage even existed.While the Democrat has distanced himself from allegations of a cover-up in the explosive case by contending evidence was promptly turned over to authorities, APâs monthslong investigation involving dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of documents found that wasnât the case with the 30-minute video he privately viewed in the fall of 2020.Response to the story was swift. A bipartisan legislative committee investigating the case in response to APâs previous reporting indicated that it would move quickly to call Edwards and key members of his staff to testify under oath.Read more
teamed up to deliver fast, factual breaking coverage of Saturdayâs racist mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, then turned to stories of the victims and a community in mourning.In the chaotic first hours after the shooting, AP avoided the erroneous reporting of other outlets, including false reports that the gunman was dead. Sharp source work had AP accurately reporting the death toll ahead of the official news conference, and that authorities suspected the shooter was driven by racism.The all-formats coverage was APâs top-performing story of the day, by far, widely used and credited by AP customers and drawing more than 1 million pageviews on AP News.Read more
AP investigative reporter Mike Rezendesâ years of source work led him to a stunning discovery: a so-called help line that enabled a cover-up of sex abuse in the Mormon church community, including the case of a 5-year-old Arizona girl, molested by her father for seven years while church leaders were aware of the abuse.
Rezendes, video journalist Jessie Wardarski and photographer Dario Lopez met with victims and their families, earning their trust and telling the story in the victimsâ own voices. The resulting package, including illustrations by Peter Hamlin, was one of APâs most-viewed investigative projects of the year, protecting the victims even as it revealed a systemic effort to cover up horrific child sex abuse.
For deep sourcing and commitment to report a story with both impact and sensitivity, Mike Rezendes, Jessie Wardarski, Dario Lopez, Peter Hamlin and Randy Herschaft earn APâs Best of the Week â First Winner honors.
found sources who gave detailed accounts of covert Russian military recruitment efforts â including offers of amnesty to prisoners â to make up the manpower shortage as losses mount in Ukraine.Getting anyone to speak, even off the record, about the recruitment drive has been virtually impossible. But APâs reporter, unnamed for their security, managed to obtain access to a Russian social network group for family members of prisoners. One woman agreed to speak privately about how her boyfriend declined the offer to fight but others accepted the offer; she said eight had died in Ukraine.Another contact, the father of a soldier, corroborated reports of hundreds of Russian soldiers refusing to fight or trying to leave the military.Read more
investigated a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agentâs deadly shooting of a mentally ill neighbor in Mississippi, revealing new details that raise questions about why the agent never faced trial on a murder charge â and the role played by DEA brass to quickly insert themselves into the case, blocking local authorities from talking to the agent.Mustian exclusively obtained hundreds of pages of investigative documents and transcripts, and spent days on the ground interviewing people with knowledge of the case for a story that questions the justification for the shooting, how Agent Harold Duane Poole avoided trial and whether the DEA overreached to protect one of its own amid a flurry of misconduct cases in the agency.Read more
collaborated on an exclusive all-formats package that revealed how the booming development of clean energy from wind turbines threatens the preservation of iconic golden eagles in the U.S. West. Brown, a veteran environmental reporter, used sourcing, records searches and interviews, finding scientists concerned that collisions with turbine blades could lead to decline of golden eagle populations which thrive on the same open, windy landscapes preferred by wind energy developers.To document the plight of the birds and efforts to preserve them, Brown and video journalist Tobin traveled to remote northern Wyoming, where scientists rappelled down rock faces in their study of the eagles, producing strong visuals to accompany the engaging and deeply reported text story.Read more
set out to document ways students with disabilities are excluded from the classroom â and from learning. Their reporting led to advocates who described working with families whose children were essentially kept out of school, with none of the records that come with formal suspensions. The families claimed their schools couldnât or wouldnât accommodate their studentsâ disabilities â a violation of federal law â and said the practice had gotten worse during the pandemic.Ma, race and ethnicity reporter in Washington, partnered with Kolodner, of the nonprofit Hechinger Report, who had been pursuing the same topic. Together, they interviewed 20 families in 10 states, and a top Department of Education official. Read more
"The drug war is a game,â JosĂ© Irizarry told two AP reporters during his final moments of freedom. âIt was a very fun game that we were playing.â
Irizarryâs decision to spend some of his last few hours before beginning a 12-year federal prison sentence with two AP reporters in early 2022 was a moment years in the making that yielded a bombshell bacchanal of a story -- itself months in the making.
Four years ago, just before starting at The Associated Press, New York-based investigative reporter Jim Mustian received a tip about a DEA investigation into one of the agencyâs own agents in Colombia. That spiraled into a string of AP scoops by Mustian and Miami-based Latin America correspondent Joshua Goodman on DEA corruption in Latin America, including an exclusive on the arrest of that agent. Irizarry had been accused of conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to divert millions from DEA money laundering stings in what prosecutors called one of the worst betrayals in DEA history.
For a deeply reported and compelling investigation, telling the tale of a former war-on-drugs warrior who crossed multiple boundaries, Mustian and Goodman earn APâs Best of the Week â First Winner honors.
With the continued weakening of state laws protecting womenâs rights to abortion in the U.S., the APâs strong coverage of abortion continues with two stories earning Best of the Week for impressive state accountability reporting and analysis.
A story that surfaced in Tennessee, finding federal dollars being spent on nonprofits aligned with the anti-abortion movement, revealed that legislatures in about a dozen U.S. states were funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to so-called crisis pregnancy centers that are typically unlicensed and have been accused of engaging in misinformation campaigns targeting pregnant women.
A second story focused on racial inequities in access to abortion, an idea sparked by an observation during a visit to the Shreveport, La., abortion clinic where almost every woman in the waiting room was Black. The all-formats package showed how minority women in states where abortion is under attack have the most to lose if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
Both stories drew strong play on AP News and customer platforms.
For revelatory state stories on two elements in the pitched national debate over abortion rights, Kruesi, Willingham, Wagster Pettus, Nasir, Solis and Lo earn APâs Best of the Week â First Winner honors.
provided the first behind-the-scenes look at one of American journalismâs biggest scoops: how the AP's Jean Heller, then a 29-year-old reporter and the only woman on the wire serviceâs fledgling investigative team, broke the story of a notorious government experiment on Black men in rural Alabama.For the 50th anniversary of the AP exclusive on the Tuskegee syphilis study â where 600 Black men were left untreated for venereal disease for more than 40 years â national writer and visual journalist Breed interviewed Heller for video, text and photos, delivering an engaging narrative. Investigative intern Alyse Marin coproduced the compelling video featuring archival material and Breedâs interviews, including Heller and a descendant of one of the men in the study.Read more
collaborated with a team of AP state reporters on an analysis of federal data, finding that states passing the toughest abortion restrictions are generally the most challenging places for people to have and raise children. With the U.S. Supreme Court widely expected to roll back abortion rights later this year, the data and reporting revealed a weak network of social services in many of these states for women who become pregnant and may be unable to obtain an abortion.APâs analysis, led by data journalists Fassett and Lo, looked at seven social safety net measurements collected by the federal government; visualized in an engaging interactive by the data teamâs Gorman. The reporting team, led by Utah statehouse reporter Whitehurst, interviewed parents, researchers and nonprofit groups that provide support to pregnant people, new parents, infants and young children. And while the data overwhelming showed that Republican-controlled states with strict abortion laws performed the worst on these social services, the reporting also came with the important caveat that a few Democratically controlled states with more permissive abortion laws also measured poorly in some categories.Read more
obtained a never-before-released, internal affairs interview with the Louisiana state trooper considered the most violent in the deadly 2019 arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene. This was the latest in a string of AP exclusives on Greeneâs death â even federal prosecutors did not know the recording existed until AP published it.In the two-hour interview. Hollingsworth admits to holding Greene down and bashing him in the head with a flashlight. But Hollingsworth portrays himself as the victim, saying he feared for his life, even as video played over and over shows the white troopers stunning, punching and dragging Greene as he appeared to surrender.Read more
put the AP hours ahead of the competition on the seizure of a Russian oligarchâs yacht in Spain.A tip to U.S. Department of Justice reporter Balsamo triggered the coverage; he alerted Madrid chief correspondent Parra who confirmed details of the seizure and put Ubilla on the scene, reporting and making images as authorities boarded the $120 million vessel belonging to billionaire friend of Putin.The all-formats piece was one of APâs most-read stories of the day; it was hours before competitors could report the basics using the federal governmentâs press announcement â and even then they still had to rely on Ubillaâs visuals.Read more
continues to hold Formula One accountable for racing in countries where human rights are routinely trampled. While covering the exceptionally intense and challenging kickoff to the F1 racing season in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Pugmire, APâs Paris-based auto racing writer, held exclusive interviews with a released torture survivor and the 12-year-old son of a man on death row, and pressured Formula One heavyweights to advocate for human rights in both countries.Pugmireâs persistence led seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton to tell him, âYou sure donât make it easy for me.â To which Pugmire replied, âThatâs because youâre the only one who doesnât duck questions.â In the private conversation that followed, the two shared experiences of meeting released prisoners, and Hamilton complimented Pugmire on his commitment to the issue. 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 victimsâ attorneys to have a multiformat team at a law firm as victims made emotional statements to members of the Sackler family. Read more
spent a year investigating the possible health effects of groundwater and soil contamination under Fort Ord, a decommissioned U.S. Army base on the central California coast. A tip led AP to a Facebook group of hundreds of soldiers who had lived at the base and developed rare forms of cancer they believe were caused by contamination.The complex, all-formats story included in-depth interviews with those likely suffering health consequences of exposure at the base, which is on the Environmental Protection Agencyâs list of the most polluted places in the nation. The team revealed a discredited 25-year-old study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found no âlikelyâ risk at the site, and documents showing the Army knew toxic chemicals had been improperly dumped at Fort Ord for decades, but took pains not to let that information become public. Read more
beat all the competition, breaking the news of President Joe Bidenâs nominee for the upcoming Supreme Court vacancy. AP flooded the media space with content on every platform, delivering a comprehensive package that told customers and readers everything they need to know about federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, what comes next and who bears watching in the process.The initial scoop came from smart source work, and the impressive range of content that quickly followed was made possible by advance coordination across formats and departments â AP was poised with thorough preparation on each of the front-runners for the nomination. Read more
teamed up to break the news that the U.S. Department of Justice is reversing course and is now âevaluatingâ opening sites for people to use heroin and other narcotics with protections against fatal overdoses.New York reporter Jennifer Peltz had pressed the DOJ for months before the department signaled it might be open to such sites, and lead DOJ reporter Balsamo used his extensive experience to expand on the departmentâs measured comments, which represent a drastic change from their hard-line stance in the Trump administration. Read more
