Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: Nevada sought to use Chinese COVID tests from UAE

joined forces for this rare hybrid story of state and international politics, revealing how the rush for medical supplies amid the pandemic raised new concerns about international trade and safety. Price used Nevada public records to report that one way the state tried to secure testing kits was by leveraging a former MGM CEO’s connections with the United Arab Emirates, which partnered with MGM to build a $9.2 billion multi-resort development in Las Vegas. The UAE donated 250,000 Chinese-made test kits that weren’t eventually used because federal officials raised concerns about patient privacy, test accuracy and the involvement of a Chinese company that is the world’s largest genetic sequencing firm. Gambrell framed the reporting around U.S. officials’ concern that foreign powers could exploit the pandemic to access medical histories and genetic traits of test takers. https://bit.ly/37mUYIl

Best of the States

AP reporting prompts bill forcing Nevada agencies to reveal federal reviews

Statehouse reporters know to follow the money, that to hold government accountable we need to know where taxpayer money goes and how it is used. Nevada temporary legislative reporter Alison Noon did just that recently and helped bring about a promised change in policy that will make the workings of the state capital more transparent.

Noon first began reporting a story that rural health clinics offering family planning services to low-income women had slashed services and were turning women away for lack of funding after federal grant money dried up.

In the course of her reporting, Noon learned the program’s federal funding had been cut after a scathing federal review that showed widespread mismanagement and poor medical practices at the rural clinics. That highly critical federal report went unmentioned when the program’s administrator sought additional state funds during the legislative session.

Noon set out to learn why. She found Nevada did not require state administrators to share the results of such federal reviews with anyone – not the governor, not department heads, not state auditors. Her reporting led to a recently proposed requirement that such reviews be shared with Nevada auditors.

For her unmatched APNewsBreak, Noon wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

APNewsBreak: Illegal immigrant tied to 4 Nevada killings

for being first to report that a 19-year-old from El Salvador, who is said to be in the country illegally, admitted killing a married couple in Nevada using a handgun linked to two other killings days earlier. https://bit.ly/2MJjI10

Best of the Week — First Winner

A ‘graveyard’: Distinctive images capture the impact of major drought on Nevada’s Lake Mead

Las Vegas-based photographer John Locher has seen no shortage of drought in his years covering the Southwest desert. But this year felt different, particularly when it came to Lake Mead, a popular tourist destination and important source of water, where levels have plummeted.

Over the course of several weeks, he made repeat visits to the lake, talking to people on beached boats, exploring different areas and running down visual leads he found on social media.

Little by little, a theme began to emerge: The receding body of water had effectively exposed a graveyard, not just of sunken boats, but also of wildlife. Locher captured this in a unique visual essay used widely and prominently by AP members and customers across the country.

For persistence, creativity and shoe-leather reporting to reveal in striking images the precipitous decline of Lake Mead, Locher earns AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner.

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP team leads media fight for photo access at OJ Simpson parole hearing

What happens when the state of Nevada announces it intends to use its own photographer to cover the parole hearing of O.J. Simpson, and exclude all others?

The Associated Press steps up, rallies the media and forces the state to backtrack. For their efforts to ensure news photo access to a high-profile story, the team of Stephanie Mullen, Ken Ritter and Tom Tait is awarded Beat of the Week.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Exclusive visuals, reporting distinguish Vegas shooting coverage

It was just one of the many mysteries surrounding the Las Vegas concert shooting: How did the gunman, perched up on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort, fire off as many as 90 rounds onto thousands of concert-goers in just 10 seconds, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds?

Reporters Sadie Gurman and Mike Balsamo found the answer. Through sourcework, they learned that Stephen Paddock was able to carry out his assault in moments because he had used two “bump stocks,” devices that allow a semi-automatic rifle to repeatedly fire like a machine gun.

The scoop was part of an impressive week of coverage by staff in the Las Vegas bureau and across the AP that also included photographer John Locher’s dramatic images of police screaming for people to take cover as the gunman sprayed the crowd with bullets.

For their work in bringing critical details and images of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Gurman, Balsamo and Locher win this week’s Beat of the Week prize.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: Search for solutions drives race to save Bonneville salt flats

collaborated on the most comprehensive coverage yet by a major news organization on a shrinking natural wonder, the Bonneville Salt Flats in northwest Utah near the Nevada border.The salt flats has long lured speed-obsessed racers and filmmakers, and, more recently, social media fans looking for a spectacular photo, but its future is in peril because the salt has been thinning for decades. When a Utah state agency launched yet another study to assess what was happening at the salt flats, AP’s Salt Lake City bureau recognized an opportunity explore the state of one the American West’s most unique sites.A thoroughly reported, reader-friendly story and impressive visuals — photos, drone images, video and digital animations — combined for a striking presentation that drew in readers.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP first to report OJ Simpson’s release from prison

for months of source work that led him to get a text in the middle of the night from a Nevada prison official that O.J. Simpson had been set free just minutes earlier – a scoop that forced competitors to cite AP. http://bit.ly/2xVgiTU

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP exposes network of scam Facebook ads using politicians’ images

for acting on an email to the AP Fact Check team from the Nevada governor’s office, alerting the team to scam ads on Facebook that used photos of politicians to offer unsuspecting homeowners lucrative tax incentives for installing solar panels. Seitz and Anderson uncovered a long-running, widespread scam – connected to a man previously sued by the Federal Trade Commission for false advertising – that exposed the threat of harvesting personal data from unwitting users, as well as Facebook’s inability to police political scam ads ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. https://bit.ly/2uYB5CN

Best of the States

AP analysis: Sports betting has not been the jackpot some states expected

When the Supreme Court allowed all states to offer betting on sports, some lawmakers across the country saw an opportunity: Here was a way to bolster state budgets with revenue from an activity that was already happening in the shadows. But an AP review showed that actual tax revenue has yet to match expectations in the majority of states that legalized sports gambling.

State government team reporter Geoff Mulvihill, based in New Jersey, and Rhode Island statehouse reporter Jennifer McDermott looked through monthly state revenue reports and then compared the tax revenue generated to the original estimates in the legislation that authorized sports betting. They found that in four of the six states that legalized it last year – Rhode Island, West Virginia, Mississippi and Pennsylvania – tax revenue was far below what the state had projected it would be.

The revenue story was the latest in a string of distinctive stories from reporters working the sports betting beat. Many of the stories, including the state revenue piece, have been accompanied by a data set compiled by Mulvihill that tracks every piece of legislation related to sports gambling. It is being made available to all AP customers who subscribe to our data distribution platform and has been promoted to local reporters as a way to add context to their stories.

For revealing the difference between lawmakers’ promises on tax revenue and the reality, Mulvihill and McDermott win this week’s Best of the States prize.

Best of the States

25 years after unresolved killings, O.J. Simpson tells AP: ‘life is fine’

Two weeks before the 25th anniversary of the killings that led to O.J. Simpson’s “Trial of the Century,” special correspondent Linda Deutsch was summoned from retirement to try to coax an interview from the fallen football star. Simpson hadn’t submitted to an interview since being released from prison in 2017, and he turned down an interview request from Deutsch last year. But Deutsch tried again, this time by phone. O.J. didn't want to talk, but he relented after Deutsch reminded him that if he spoke to her, AP’s story would reach all media.

Simpson wouldn’t discuss the crime, but he provided a glimpse into a life now very much outside the public eye, telling Deutsch “life is fine,” a quote that stung any who believed he got away with murder.

Deutsch’s story, including two photos of Simpson at home that were exclusive to the AP, was the day’s top-read AP story online, and the centerpiece of a multi-story package looking back at Simpson’s trial, its key figures and its impact.

For a timely, exclusive interview with a man who remains the focus of intense public interest, Linda Deutsch receives AP’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP breaks news on Justice Department election investigations

both delivered scoops on the U.S. Department of Justice and election investigations.Balsamo kept hearing rumors of the DOJ looking into election cases, but he knew there were rules prohibiting such investigations during an ongoing election. He kept asking until a source revealed a memo Attorney General William Barr had sent to prosecutors nationwide authorizing federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue any “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the election is certified, despite the fact there was no evidence of widespread fraud giving prosecutors the ability to go around the longstanding policy. The scoop reverberated nationwide, especially as concerns grew over Trump’s ability to use the levers of government to hang on to power. The story was widely used, with Politico, Axios and NBC citing AP in their coverage of Barr’s memo. AP’s alert and a full story were on the wire more than 40 minutes before other major news organizations obtained a copy of the memo.Meanwhile, Las Vegas reporter Michelle Price was digging into how the DOJ was pursuing allegations from the Trump campaign that voters may have cast improper ballots in Nevada. Price and Balsamo teamed up with voting reporter Anthony Izaguirre to report out two ongoing investigations, and how they may not hold up to scrutiny. Price used her contacts to get exclusive first-person accounts from U.S. military members who thought they’d been wrongly accused of fraud for voting by mail from out of state by Nevada authorities and DOJ officials.https://bit.ly/2Kqu09ehttps://bit.ly/3lOlxKR

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Sweeping team coverage as wildfire threatens Lake Tahoe

teamed up across formats, beats and states, drawing on AP resources throughout the West to dominate coverage of the high-profile Northern California wildfires that threatened an international gem, Lake Tahoe.Striking photos by Noah Berger and Jae Hong captured the drama as the fire raged toward the resort city and a vast swath of the Sierra Nevada. Report for America journalist Sam Metz was indefatigable on the ground, interviewing rescue workers, residents and firefighters, then capturing the chaos of the evacuation. Reporters John Antczak, Janie Har and Jocelyn Gecker worked the phones from Los Angeles and San Francisco providing detail and context as they wrote the spot stories. Video journalist Terence Chea and Michelle L. Price reported on people who refused to leave.For this latest in a series of major blazes, the West region dug to identify wildfire-related stories of interest beyond the breaking news, including Tom Verdin’s story on the special sites that were threatened, Don Thompson’s assessment of what went wrong in fighting the blaze, Brian Melley’s report on canceled vacations nationwide and a piece by Metz and Scott Sonner on price gouging.https://aplink.news/rwdhttps://aplink.news/qo4https://aplink.news/slxhttps://aplink.news/cp0https://aplink.video/4jlhttps://aplink.video/a3bhttps://apnews.com/hub/wildfires

Best of the Week — First Winner

Powered by facts: AP investigation undercuts Trump voter fraud claims, prompts rare interview

Former President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election and his efforts to spread the false claim that widespread voter fraud cost him a second term raised a critical question: How much voter fraud occurred in the six crucial battleground states disputed by Trump?

Turns out, just 473 potential cases in those states. Many of the cases involved Republicans and virtually every case was an individual acting alone rather than coordinated fraud.

AP’s finding was the result of an exhaustive investigation by a team of reporters, data journalists and others, based on detailed fact checks of the vote entries for every county in each of the six states. The investigation also led to an exceptionally rare recorded phone interview with the former president in which he repeated his unfounded conspiracy theories but could find no fault with AP’s reporting.

The story made headlines and was widely cited. For meticulous reporting and analysis that revealed the actual attention-grabbing sliver of voter fraud cases, the team of Christina A. Cassidy, Scott Bauer, Bob Christie, David Eggert, Camille Fassett, Anthony Izaguirre, Shawn Marsh, Anna Nichols, Michelle Price, Ed White and Corey Williams is AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP Exclusive: US ‘red flag’ laws little-used despite gun violence surge

used exhaustive data gathering and analysis, as well as interviews with experts and authorities across the country, to produce an exclusive, first-ever count that shows U.S. states barely using the much-touted “red flag” laws that give them the power to take guns away from people who threaten to kill. The trend is traced to lack of awareness of the laws and outright resistance by some police to enforce them, even as shootings and gun deaths soar.Condon’s deeply reported story adds data and clarity to the debate over red flag laws, which are promoted as the most powerful tools available to prevent gun violence before it happens. But as the piece shows, such laws are only useful if they are actually enforced.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Series by AP and partners reveals Colorado River near crisis

collaborated on in-depth coverage from all corners of the Colorado River basin, building a comprehensive, visually engaging and illuminating series on the state of one of America’s most important rivers, which is approaching a crisis point because of climate change and overuse.All-formats AP journalists teamed up with the Colorado Sun, Albuquerque Journal, Salt Lake Tribune, Arizona Daily Star, Nevada Independent and Santa Fe New Mexican, all contributing stories from their respective states.The series included 11 text stories, with photos and animations for each, exploring the river from the perspectives of all seven Basin states, Native American tribes and Mexico. The package featured two revealing video pieces, an overview of how the river got to this point and the challenges tribes face to exercise their water rights. One week after the series launch, the stories had been picked up by more than 1,100 outlets.Read more