The 12-week “What Can Be Saved?” series pushed the boundaries of AP’s storytelling capabilities with vibrant stories and absolutely stunning visuals.
The brief for the project was anything but simple: find a way to cover climate change’s effects on the planet in a way that avoided turning the audience off with a gloom-and-doom or heavily text-centric approach.
The result was “What Can Be Saved?”, a sprawling environmental series that expanded the boundaries of AP’s visual storytelling. The series traveled to 10 countries on five continents, focusing on everything from attempts to bring back Jamaica’s coral reefs, to the conservation of lions and gorillas in Africa, to China’s ambitious plans to build a national park system, to a trip down one of Europe’s last wild rivers.
It was the work of 33 journalists, 15 editors and four translators throughout AP’s global newsroom, reaching millions of people across all formats – and not just because Leonardo DiCaprio touted some of the installments on Instagram and Twitter. The series was able to leverage grant money to fund improvements in AP’s platform that will serve all our best journalism going forward, including the ability to display full-bleed photos and looped videos. It also reached audiences in new ways, with a highlight in audience engagement being the performance of the mini-documentaries and other online videos.
“WHAT CAN BE SAVED?” WEEK 1: Diver Everton Simpson untangles lines of staghorn coral at a coral nursery inside the White River Fish Sanctuary, Feb. 11, 2019, in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.
AP Photo / David J. Phillip
Houston-based staff photographer David J. Phillip covers divers planting coral on a reef in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Feb. 12, 2019.
AP Photo / David Goldman
Health and Science staffers, Washington-based reporter Christina Larson, left, and New York video journalist Kathy Young, interview a fisherman in White River, Jamaica, Feb. 11, 2019.
AP Photo / David Goldman
WEEK 2: Scientist Eloy Torres shows to a colleague a plant sample during a mission to study how temperatures and plant life are changing in the Andean ecosystem known as the paramos – a mist-covered mountain grassland that lies between the top of the treeline and the bottom of the Humboldt glacier, in Merida, Venezuela, Feb. 19, 2019.
AP Photo / Rodrigo Abd
WEEK 3: Agriculture technician Jesus Alfurez holds a sapling for transplanting as he crosses a river assisted by a villager, headed to a contaminated gold-mining camp in Madre de Dios, Peru, April 5, 2019.
AP Photo / Rodrigo Abd
Washington-based Health and Science staffer Federica Narancio shoots footage in Monongahela National Forest, W.Va., Aug. 27, 2019.
AP Photo / Patrick Semansky
Richmond, Va., staff photographer Steve Helber pilots a drone in Monongahela National Forest, W.Va., Aug. 27, 2019.
AP Photo / Patrick Semansky
WEEK 4: Saitoti Petro, center wearing blue, tracks lions near the village of Loibor Siret, Tanzania, July 6, 2019. Petro is one of more than 50 lion monitors from communities on the Maasai Steppe who walk daily patrol routes to help shepherds shield their cattle in pasture, with support and training from a small Tanzanian nonprofit called African People and Wildlife.
AP Photo / Jerome Delay
WEEK 5: Wildlife technician Jordan Hazan records data in a lab in Corvallis, Ore., from a male barred owl he shot earlier in the night, Oct. 24, 2018. The owl was killed as part of a controversial experiment by the U.S. government to test whether the northern spotted owl’s rapid decline in the Pacific Northwest can be stopped by killing its larger and more aggressive East Coast cousin, the barred owl, which now outnumber spotted owls in many areas of the native bird’s historic range.
AP Photo / Ted S. Warren
WEEK 6: A river rafting guide paddles at dusk on the Vjosa River in Albania, June 29, 2019. Those who live along the riverbank or rely on the waterway for their livelihood fear dams could kill the Vjosa as they know it. Its fragile ecosystem will be irreversibly altered, and many residents will lose their land and homes.
AP Photo / Felipe Dana
WEEK 7: A silverback mountain gorilla named Segasira walks in the Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, Sept. 2, 2019. A concerted and sustained conservation campaign has averted the worst and given a second chance to these great apes, which share about 98% of human DNA.
AP Photo / Felipe Dana
New York-based Health and Science staffer Marshall Ritzel records a gorilla in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, October, 2019. (AP Photo)
AP Photo
Istanbul-based video journalist Bram Janssen, right, interviews gorilla tracker Emmanuel Bizagwira at home in Rwanda, September 2019.
AP Photo / Felipe Dana
Global enterprise photographer Felipe Dana shoots photos of a gorilla in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, September 2019.
AP Photo / Christina Larson
WEEK 8: Prairie potholes are displayed by a satellite image on a car’s information screen while traveling on a gravel road near Rutland, N.D., June 22, 2019. Despite their mind-boggling numbers – several million potholes are spread across a region that covers portions of five states and three Canadian provinces – these wetlands are in decline. One by one, they're being drained or plowed under.
AP Photo / Charlie Riedel
WEEK 9: Tibetan prayer flags hang in Angsai, an area inside the Sanjiangyuan region in western China’s Qinghai province Aug. 26, 2019. Ringed by the world’s tallest mountain ranges, the region long known as “the rooftop of the world” is now in the crosshairs of China’s latest modernization push. But the Chinese government wants to set limits on the region’s growth in order to implement its own version of one of the U.S.’s proudest legacies – a national park system.
AP Photo / Ng Han Guan
WEEK 10: A St. Francis Satyr butterfly rests on a leaf in a swamp at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, July 29, 2019. Its wing was marked by a biologist studying the rare insect. At one point, this modest-looking butterfly could be found in only one place on Earth: Fort Bragg’s artillery range. Now, thanks in great measure to the Endangered Species Act. they are found in eight more places — though all of them are on other parts of the Army base.
AP Photo / Robert F. Bukaty
WEEK 11: Marybeth Head, who also serves as the vessel operations coordinator of Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary, works on a habitat mapping project aboard a NOAA ship, about 20 miles off the coast of Georgia, Aug. 7, 2019. The federal research vessel is full of scientists conducting research on subjects ranging from whether invasive lionfish are present to how changing ocean conditions are affecting coral species.
AP Photo / Robert F. Bukaty
Port of the Islands, a resort and marina, is surrounded by state and federal wetlands along the Tamiami Trail in the western Everglades near Naples, Florida, Oct. 24, 2019.
AP Photo / Robert F. Bukaty
Raleigh, North Carolina-based national enterprise reporter Allen Breed, left, accompanies EverGlades National Park staffers who captured a 14-foot Burmese python near an upscale housing development in Naples, Fla., Oct. 23, 2019.
AP Photo / Robert F. Bukaty
Maine-based staff photographer Robert F. Bukaty shoots photos of a grasshopper in Everglades National Park, October 2019.
AP Photo / Allen G. Breed
Through Dec. 3, the videos had been watched 1.3 million times, with about 970,000 of those views coming from people watching on their TVs. Those users spent about 7.6 million minutes watching the mini-movies, an average of nearly 8 minutes per user. (Users watching through game consoles also averaged about 8 minutes.)
In terms of broadcast video, tracking shows the videos airing more than 765 times. On AP News, the stories had almost 400,000 combined pageviews, led by more than 70,000 pageviews for the opening story on coral renewal. The stories on gorillas, lions, glaciers, wetlands, rivers and China’s “Yellowstone” each had more than 30,000 pageviews each – about 30% higher than our average for all global enterprise over the same period.
“What Can Be Saved?” showcased AP’s enhanced storytelling capabilities with vibrant stories and absolutely stunning visuals.
While there are too many individuals who contributed to “What Can Be Saved?” to name them all, editors behind this project deserve special accolades. They moved mountains to make the series such a success.
A great blue heron lands in a tree at Everglades National Park, Oct. 21, 2019.
AP Photo / Robert F. Bukaty
They include senior editor-at-large Kristin Gazlay; Health and Science editors Jon Fahey, Alicia Chang and Jon Poet; global enterprise video editor Jeannie Ohm, deputy director of photography for global enterprise Enric Marti, global photo enterprise photographer Maye-E Wong, global enterprise editor for digital storytelling Raghu Vadarevu, director of original programming Jaime Holguin and director of digital innovation Ted Anthony. Editor-at-large Jerry Schwartz edited many of the stories.
For ambitious storytelling and compelling display on a subject of global significance, the extended team behind the “What Can Be Saved?” series wins AP’s Best of the Week award. This week’s cash award will be donated to AP’s Employee Relief Fund.