for reporting exclusively that Texas track coach Mario Sategna, who also coached two Olympic gold medalists in Rio, is under an ethics investigation by the university. http://apne.ws/2enNAhX
Paul J. Weber, newsperson, Austin, and Eric Gay, photogapher, San Antonio, Texas, for documenting Texasâ quiet but sweeping funding cuts to the 2,300 impoverished border communities known as âcolonias,â and including 360-degree video. http://abcn.ws/2wMSFbI
As the six-month mark approached of Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas, Austin Administrative Correspondent Will Weissert and Fort Worth Correspondent Emily Schmall teamed up to report exclusively that the stateâs decision to lead housing recovery â meant to be faster and better than anything the federal government could muster â was actually resulting in backlogs that made the chaotic response after 2005âs Hurricane Katrina look good by comparison.
Acting on a tip, the duo dug into federal records and added field reporting to produce a multi-format report showing that delay by the governor, and the state land officeâs steep learning curve, meant temporary shelter and quick-fix home repair programs were rolling out at a startlingly slow pace.
For excellent sourcing and taking a deeper look at Texasâ hurricane recovery process, Weissert and Schmall share this weekâs Best of the States prize.
pushed through last weekâs winter storm coverage with top-notch storytelling even as many suffered hardship of their own.When deadly subfreezing temperatures, snow and ice smacked much of the southern U.S., it knocked out the power grid in Texas, the nationâs energy capital â and that was only the beginning. The bursting pipes, boil water advisories and accusations of price gouging that followed would only exacerbate the suffering for millions left shivering while nearly 80 people died.AP reporters showed in spot and enterprise stories that everything came down to a failure of government, particularly in Texas and neighboring Deep South states where infrastructure breakdowns revealed how unprepared much of the nation is for extreme weather.All this happened as many Texas staffers suffered along with their neighbors, with no power, heat or water. But they got creative and kept up the effort for a fully multiformat report, writing stories on phones when WiFi didnât work, calling in feeds or charging electronics at colleaguesâ homes. One Dallas reporter relocated to the home of an AP retiree when her own power was knocked out.https://bit.ly/2ZMQANFhttps://bit.ly/3dIKS7Dhttps://bit.ly/3r4YEWhhttps://bit.ly/3bAFQHBhttps://bit.ly/3bFHasKhttps://bit.ly/3uuAarl
Paul Weber, reporter, Austin, Texas, for accountability reporting that showed state Attorney General Ken Paxton had accepted a $100,000 ...
for an exclusive, intimate, cross-format window into an overlooked population who would bear the brunt of Texasâ proposed bathroom bill: transgender children whose teachers have kept their birth genders secret from their peers. https://yhoo.it/2rNWkb2
Hurricane Harvey killed more than 80 people and triggered historic flooding in Houston and across large swaths of Texas. But it also sparked oil spills and gasoline shortages. Those presented major tests for the stateâs Railroad Commission, which, despite its peculiar name, actually regulates the energy industry â with historically lax enforcement.
So when the commissionâs executive director, Kim Corley, abruptly resigned, the timing and circumstances made Austin newsman Paul Weber curious. He began making calls and soon secured a tip: Corley had been on vacation and unreachable at the height of the Category 4 hurricane that walloped the industry she was paid $180,000 annually to safeguard.
For his exclusive on a hyper-competitive story, Weber wins this weekâs Best of the States award.
used the Freedom of Information Act and on-the-ground reporting in the Texas Panhandle to reveal a new Dust Bowl brewing on farmland above the nationâs biggest aquifer â and the halting efforts to stave it off.Farmers, communities and researchers have long known that groundwater in the Ogallala aquifer was steadily declining due to irrigation and might not recover. But while researching a story about disappearing prairie grasslands, Webber discovered that both issues were colliding to create another challenge: As climate change is making rainfall scarcer, farmland is blowing away just as it did during the Dust Bowl.Webber, a member of APâs global environment team, talked to researchers who warned of huge farmland losses, and she traveling to the Panhandle town of Muleshoe where she told the story of farmers planting native grasses to preserve terrain as their wells struggle to produce water. She also reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had identified a Dust Bowl zone where farmers would receive extra money for grasslands conservation, and spent months prying loose government data showing that not all farmers were embracing the program.Webberâs comprehensive and engagingly written narrative, with photos by freelancer Mark Rogers, vividly captured the new Dust Bowl threatening an important agricultural region, and the efforts to keep farmers on their land. https://aplink.news/6or
led a team of AP journalists exclusively documenting the potential health impact of an alarming series of events in residential areas of Arlington, Texas: Literally in the shadow of Motherâs Heart Learning Center, a day care center that primarily serves Black and Latino children, a French company is pumping for natural gas â and seeking to drill three new wells.The APâs all-formats story not only captured the stories of families facing heightened risks, it also put their stories in the context of a trend with far-reaching consequences: Despite pledges from global leaders to embrace cleaner energy, the worldâs reliance on natural gas is growing.Seizing on a tip from area activists, energy reporter Bussewitz and national writer Irvine spoke with mothers exasperated with government inaction, residents who endure noise and vibrations just outside their backyards, and people who often breathe dangerous fumes, including one who developed asthma.Collaborating with Irvine on the reporting, Bussewitz took the lead on writing while multiformat specialist Irvine shot the video and photos, consulting on the photo selection with editors Maye-E Wong and Swayne Hall. The story was buttressed by two exclusive data analyses, including one by data journalist Angeliki Kastanis that found the density of wells in a given neighborhood correlated with the proportion of residents of color.Digital storytelling producer Peter Hamlin created a video explainer and graphic artist Francois Duckett developed an interactive map showing the proximity of wells to day cares. And Dario Lopez, digital storytelling producer for global investigations, built an online presentation that deftly packaged all the components.The project drew immediate responses on social media and was used by news outlets across the country, notably in Texas, where newsrooms pride themselves on their energy coverage.https://aplink.news/fhghttps://aplink.video/nf3https://interactives.ap.org/na...
uncovered evidence of deep dysfunction inside Texas Attorney General Ken Paxtonâs office, including criminal cases dropped and seasoned lawyers quitting over practices they say aim to slant legal work, reward loyalists and drum out dissent.The investigation by Dallas-based Bleiberg, based on hundreds of pages of public and confidential records, data analysis and interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees, found numerous examples of an agency in disarray, including efforts to turn cases to political advantage, staff vacancies ballooning and, last month, a series of human trafficking and child sexual assault cases dropped after losing track of one of the victims.Read more
In the three years since the deadliest biker shooting in U.S. history, Fort Worth correspondent Emily Schmall has meticulously gathered documents, reports and court records to put together a spreadsheet that integrates autopsy reports, firearms analyses and ballistics evidence, including the names and serial numbers of the weapons, to whom they were traced, where they were recovered from and whether they were linked to a death or injury.
Her work paid off last week when prosecutors handed down the first murder charges in the case. Schmall was able to exclusively report that prosecutors had charged one of the bikers for murdering a man who was shot twice by a SWAT officer.
For persistent, investigative reporting that exclusively illuminated potential problems with a shifting strategy in a closely-watched case, Schmall wins this weekâs Best of the States.
used source work, non-public documents and a technique borrowed from spycraft to connect recent criminal allegations against the Texas attorney general to the conservative Republicanâs previously unreported extramarital affair.In late September, Attorney General Ken Paxtonâs top deputies accused him of criminally abusing his office to help a wealthy donor. Bleiberg spent weeks building sources in his aggressive pursuit of answers to what was behind these explosive, but unspecified, allegations.Those efforts paid off last week when Bleiberg was able to obtain a private transcript of real estate developer Nate Paul acknowledging that the attorney general recommended he hire a woman whom Paxton was rumored to have had an affair with. The sensitive document was picked up at a âdead dropâ â a prearranged drop spot â by Austin reporter Paul Weber.Bleiberg then worked sources heâd developed while breaking earlier stories to identify people whom the attorney general may have told about his affair. His relentless outreach ultimately turned up two people with firsthand accounts of Paxton acknowledging the affair in 2018.The reporting allowed AP to draw back the curtain on one of Americaâs most prominent conservative legal crusaders and break major news on a highly competitive story. It revealed a relationship thatâs almost certainly at the center of an ongoing federal public corruption probe. https://bit.ly/2UnuZc1
When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced heâd sent a letter leaning on Gunnison County, Colorado, to end an order expelling non-residents during the pandemic, APâs Paul Weber immediately wondered: Why was the top law enforcement official in Texas picking a fight with a remote county two states away in the middle of the crisis? And did Paxton have donors there?
Weber and colleague Jake Bleiberg started combing campaign finance and property records, quickly finding that some of Paxtonâs biggest donors have homes in the wealthy mountain resort town of Crested Butte, Colorado.
Persistent reporting and extensive public records work revealed that Paxtonâs push against the Gunnison health order stood to benefit an exclusive group of Texans, including campaign donors who gave the attorney general a total of nearly $2 million. AP Texas members jumped on the story, using it in print and online.
For alertly connecting the dots between a puzzling press release and a conflict of interest in the attorney general's office, Weber and Bleiberg earn this weekâs Best of the States award.
for breaking two completely unrelated Texas scoops: that the University of Texas had fired former star quarterback Vince Young from his part-time job as an ambassador and development officer for the school, and for reporting that after barely three months after Democrats showed signs of cracking Republican dominance in state elections, Gov. Greg Abbott used the power of his office to appoint GOP judges who had been rejected by voters to new positions on the bench.https://bit.ly/2J6ZNe3https://bit.ly/2TB5fe3
for using open records requests and data analysis to show that dubious âhigh threatâ arrests are being used to help justify spending $1 billion to secure the Texas-Mexico border, even though some involve small crimes, first-time offenders or offenses that occurred far from the border. http://bit.ly/2ebDwYT
Few places in America have been as hard hit by the pandemic as the Texas border, and the package by this all-formats team exposes the stark contrast between this part of the country and regions with greater resources.
With access to two hospitals overwhelmed by cases in the Rio Grande Valley, AP reporter Paul Weber, photographer Eric Gay and video journalist John Mone carefully documented stories of patients and staff, including a new mom in the maternity ward who unknowingly contracted the virus and had to be isolated from her newborn.
Weber wrote: âThe U.S. failure to contain the pandemic has been laid bare.â
For a compelling and hard-to-report all-formats package, Weber, Gay and Mone win this weekâs Best of the States award.
collaborated on an extraordinary portrait of a town grieving after the May 24 mass shooting that left gaping holes in its fabric.In a chaotic and fraught environment with countless journalists gathered around the memorials and overwhelming the family members of shooting victims, the AP trio decided to approach the story differently â they wanted to explore the connections within the Uvalde community. They split up, looking for the people in that next circle of relationships: barbers, bus drivers and others who crossed paths with the affected families.It all came together in a heart-wrenching package that appeared on numerous websites and front pages. The team received compliments from readers â and one of the individuals they profiled â for the sensitive and compassionate way they covered this traumatic story.Read more
for investigating Texas' $1.6 million contract with an anti-abortion group and finding the state didn't get its money's worth; the stateâs House ethics chairwoman launched an investigation. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f7645d59944d47228f2...
AP journalists were on the U.S-Mexico border for an immigration assignment May 24 when they got word of a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. They quickly gathered their gear and rushed to Robb Elementary School, where they found chaotic scenes of law enforcement surrounding the school. The staffers immediately went to work providing photos and live video.
That swift response to the unfolding tragedy made the AP the first national news organization on the scene and set the tone for the rest of the week. As more staff deployed, AP delivered dominant, all-formats coverage that explored with sensitivity not only the shooting that left 19 fourth graders and two teachers dead, but inconsistencies in the actions and statements of police â and much more.
Readers and customers responded with exceptional engagement.
For a powerful example of the AP at its finest on a major news story that has led to an outpouring of sympathy for the families, questions about police practices and the latest reckoning on guns and school safety, the AP Uvalde coverage team earns Best of the Week â First Winner.
for being first to publish an interview with the mother of one of the victims in the Texas school shooting, who said her daughter just days earlier had spurned aggressive, romantic advances from the young gunman. https://bit.ly/2J33Ua6