for landing an exclusive telephone interview with a South Carolina prison inmate who calmly confesses his role in the deaths of four fellow prisoners. https://apnews.com/f939c602fe9f40e3a33ebe78331a08e...
for breaking major developments in the Senate Republicans’ struggles to get a health care bill, from the first word of the Congressional Budget Office’s report that 22 million would be uninsured under the bill, to a key senator’s defection, to plans to delay a vote until after the July 4th recess. http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-pol...
for their exclusive reporting revealing how local and federal authorities in North Carolina dragged their feet investigating a complaint about an assault lasting nearly two hours at the Word of Faith Fellowship church, a pattern of reluctance that has spared the church any real consequences. https://www.apnews.com/38b9d91484424429b629bc0a275...
for being the first to report the rules governing who would be barred from entering the United States after the Supreme Court allowed President Trump's travel ban to go into effect in modified form. https://apnews.com/9c3d06565daf40cc86f0f80f5ad0eff...
for getting photos of prison inmates moving furniture at the New Jersey statehouse and defending press freedom. Corrections officers erroneously told Catalini such photos are illegal and ordered him to remove the images from his phone. Catalini stood his ground and saved the images in his deleted photos folder. After receiving a letter from an AP lawyer, officials conceded the officers were wrong. AP had already moved the images. https://apnews.com/348a45a1135843468642d420be093de...
Jon Krawczynski and Tim Reynolds, for keeping AP out front during NBA free agency, combining for 28 bylines on trades deals, including news that Blake Griffin would stay with the Los Angeles Clippers on a $175 million five-year contract.
http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/ap-sources-...
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/sports/ap-sou...
Iraqi Humvees wind their way through the pockmarked streets of Mosul. The rattle of gunfire and thud of a nearby airstrike fill the air. Terrified civilians scurry across the road to safety.
In the APs first long-form 360 video project, Middle East Photo Editor Maya Alleruzzo teamed up with video editor Claudia Prat to produce a riveting and harrowing video, "House to House: The Battle for Mosul." The 8-minute video earns Alleruzzo the Beat of the Week.
for cross-format teamwork and exclusive coverage of alleged labor abuses at a shoe factory in China making Ivanka Trump-branded items. Kinetz and Ting managed to talk to workers who complained of overtime that stretched past midnight, steep production quotas and crude verbal and even physical abuse. Shih and Ting closely followed the story of three activists detained while investigating the plant, including getting exclusive photos and video when they were later released.
https://apnews.com/6cfff3ca3c7d422594556044369bfb8...
https://www.apnews.com/d120059433fd4767b2e3a1c2477...
New York City police reporter Colleen Long was taking the elevator at police headquarters on a quiet Friday afternoon before the Fourth of July weekend when she overheard a couple of patrol officers suddenly talking with alarm. “Oh my God,” one of them said. “Something’s going on at Bronx Lebanon Hospital. I think an active shooter.”
Long got off on the next stop and immediately called a source as she took the stairs down to her office in the second-floor press room, known as “the shack.” By the time she got to the desk, she had enough information to call the New York City bureau with a barebones APNewsAlert: “NEW YORK (AP) — Police are responding to a report of shots fired inside a New York City hospital.”
So began a bureau-wide reporting effort on a story that would unfold in unusual detail, even in the long litany of American gun violence. For leading a team effort that put the AP out front and kept us there, Colleen Long wins the Best of the States Award and the $300 that goes with it for the second week in a row.
for revealing the extent of the United Arab Emirates' network of secret prisons in southern Yemen – at least 18 black sites – and the pervasiveness of torture. Her work forced U.S. officials to confirm for the first time that American interrogators have questioned detainees from the prisons, a potential violation of international law that would counter efforts to disassociate the U.S. war on terror from the use of torture. http://apne.ws/2s5h22B
for being one of the first journalists on the scene when a man drove a van into a group of worshippers after late-night prayers outside a London mosque. Negas streamed live images via the Bambuser app beating AP's competitors by at least 45 minutes and even supplied live video to AP's U.K. Partner SKY News before they went live from the scene. http://bit.ly/2tpWx40
for breaking the news that a live Asian carp had been caught in a Chicago waterway beyond a fortified electric barrier designed to stop the voracious fish, and about nine miles from Lake Michigan where its presence would threaten the ecosystem. http://wapo.st/2sqcvXU
for revealing the curious tale of a former Iranian-born CIA gunrunner and his business interests around the globe. They shed a light on the relationship between a prominent journalist and the mysterious figure he had cultivated as a secret source. http://apne.ws/2sla51H
for heading to the southwestern city of Mianyang as soon as news broke that a landslide had engulfed a village and capturing dramatic photos and video from the site. http://apne.ws/2t4urt7
for landing a scoop about an effort by a broad group including the 28-nation European Union, the United States, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Israel and four other countries to pressure China to scale back plans for intensive inspections of imports that they say would hamper access to its fast-growing market. http://on-ajc.com/2skMfTt
for revealing the list of demands by Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries on Qatar to resolve a major diplomatic crisis. http://apne.ws/2sxygIL
for an all-formats project on a grassroots movement to combat violence against women in Argentina. http://apne.ws/2sigN6F
How is it that Republicans and Democrats can split the vote about equally in races for Congress and state legislatures, yet the GOP wins significant majorities in the House of Representatives and in statehouses across the country? Partisan gerrymandering, which manipulates legislative districts for one party’s benefit, has been suspected, but there has been no way to actually quantify it – until now.
An Associated Press team of David Lieb, Meghan Hoyer and Maureen Linke, applying a new statistical method that calculates partisan advantage, analyzed U.S. House and state legislative races across the country last year and found that redistricting controlled by Republicans had given their party a distinct advantage and one that will be hard for Democrats to overcome in upcoming election cycles.
Their multi-format report – including easy-to-grasp interactives and a trove of localized data – is the Beat of the Week.
Colleen Long was by herself on the New York City desk this past Sunday with plenty to do, including taking feeds from two different stringers to update national stories on gay pride parades and a graduation at a suburban high school shattered by killings blamed on the violent MS-13 gang.
But she still managed to jump into action on what turned out to be one of the day’s most clickable stories – of a teenager who dangled and then fell 25 feet from a gondola ride at an upstate New York amusement park.
Not only did Long land an interview with a father and daughter who scrambled to safely catch the 14-year-old girl, she also got the man to send in video that a friend took of the entire event, a reporting tour de force that singlehandedly put the AP out front across all formats.
For doggedly working a story from the desk to keep the AP competitive, Colleen Long wins this week’s Best of the States Award.
for being first to report that President Donald Trump, in a private White House meeting with 15 Republicans senators, criticized the House GOP health care bill as "mean." It was the same bill he had praised in a Rose Garden ceremony last month. http://abcn.ws/2tzM0ky