Best of the States

Brown reveals thousands of safety defects on oil train lines in 44 states

As domestic production of oil has increased in recent years, Billings, Montana, Correspondent Matthew Brown closely followed derailments of trains carrying volatile crude. A train from North Dakota jumped the track, exploded and killed 47 people in Canada in 2013. In Brown’s own state, a derailment near the town of Culbertson spilled 27,000 gallons of oil in 2015. Last year, Brown reported that more than 800 potential safety violations were discovered on Union Pacific freight lines after a fiery June 2016 oil train derailment in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge.

But Brown wanted to know how widespread the problem really was. By pushing repeatedly for public records and working with a longtime source, Brown was able to exclusively report the results of a two-year federal inspection program for the nation’s oil trains – and he revealed that some safety defects uncovered where similar to ones blamed in derailments that triggered huge fires or oil spills in Oregon, Virginia, Montana and elsewhere. For his AP NewsBreak, Brown wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Daring escape: Dissident lawyer's family flees China with US help

for his exclusive narrative detailing how the wife and children of an imprisoned Chinese rights lawyer-activist managed to elude government security agents and escape China to reach the U.S. The gripping story revealed the lengths China's government has been increasingly willing to go in pursuit of dissidents and their families. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/...

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

New Zealand’s plan to save birds: Kill every rat

for examining New Zealand’s ambitious plan to eliminate every invasive predator in a bid to save the country’s rare birds, including the iconic kiwi. https://apnews.com/0eec2d820e474fbfac29f4297a43645...

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Don’t look down! NYPD unit does its work at dizzying heights

for their exclusive, all-formats ascent of the Brooklyn Bridge to tell the story of an elite New York police unit that specializes in high-rise rescues. https://apnews.com/565fe20ee6f3462c82eddc643de4980...

Best of the Week — First Winner

​AP reveals hidden horror of school sex assaults

The email to AP confided: “Up until reading your article I believed that my daughter's assault was an anomaly. It's not something that is talked about. School officials must take immediate and proactive steps to protect students from being assaulted on school grounds. The first step is to bring it out in the open.”

The anguished mother was responding to the first installment of an Associated Press series running through May exploring the untold story of student-on-student sexual assaults, not on college campuses but in U.S. elementary and secondary schools. The result of a yearlong investigation, the expose by Emily Schmall, Reese Dunklin, Robin McDowell and Justin Pritchard earns the Beat of the Week.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Exclusive Oval Office interview yields big news as Trump nears 100 days

It was supposed to be a 15-minute interview. Instead, Associated Press Chief White House Correspondent Julie Pace kept President Donald Trump talking for an hour in a wide-ranging Oval Office discussion that was exclusive, illuminating and full of news.

Pace's sit-down with the president – resulting in multiple stories that others scrambled to follow and a transcript that readers devoured despite its 8,000-word length – earns the Beat of the Week.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Scams push foreclosure fraud to the limit, taking victims' homes

for detailing a devastating but little-known outgrowth of the housing crisis: Deed-theft scams that trick mostly elderly and vulnerable people into signing over title to their homes, typically in gentrifying areas, leaving them homeless or facing years of legal wrangling to undo the fraud. http://apne.ws/2oERZ4U

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Emails, documents show officials made questionable decisions in California dam crisis

for an AP investigation that for the first time brought to light a series of questionable decisions that nearly brought disaster to California communities downstream of the nation's tallest dam. https://apnews.com/0a4b46c359444c58918ad374f7cd3d2...

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Trump Country: Story of county, a refugee haven, that embraced anti-immigrant stance

for a widely played second installment of the series, Trump Country. The AP journalists got the people of Androscoggin County, Maine, a community revived by refugees, to open up about the anti-immigrant fervor that helped elect Donald Trump, who carried the county. https://apnews.com/7f2b534b80674596875980b9b6e701c...

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Tehran team first with news of surprise Ahmadinejad candidacy for president

for breaking the news that controversial former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had unexpectedly registered to run again. His candidacy was later nixed by election regulators. http://abcn.ws/2p2ThcH

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP presses for details of judge's ruling on immigration ban

At a time when the very integrity of news is under attack in some corners, it is more important than ever that The Associated Press be a key champion of accuracy. This includes not only fighting back against false claims and false reporting, but sometimes simply waiting as we push for more specificity. New York City News Editor David Caruso did exactly that over the weekend, avoiding the missteps of other news organizations by pressing for details of a federal judge's emergency order temporarily staying part of President Donald Trump's travel ban for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations.

Caruso demanded, and got, a copy of U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly's order so the AP could be precise about reporting on its relatively narrow effects, even as other news outlets relied on tweets from advocates who made it seem more sweeping. Caruso’s careful, painstaking work is the Beat of the Week.

Best of the Week — First Winner

​AP Exclusive: Before Trump job, Manafort worked to aid Putin

Around last November’s election, Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, resurfaced as a priority for the AP’s Washington investigative team when it became clear he was a leading focus of the government’s inquiry into whether Trump’s campaign had coordinated with Russians to meddle in the presidential election.

Jeff Horwitz and Chad Day, along with AP colleagues in Washington and elsewhere, dove in and after weeks of reporting, learned that Manafort had worked for a Russian billionaire a decade ago and had proposed to him a plan to greatly benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under then-President George W. Bush grew worse.

For their

Best of the States

Under radar, Florida spent about $250M on private lawyers, fees

AP Tallahassee reporter Gary Fineout started noticing how often Florida under Republican Gov. Rick Scott was losing court cases over its policies and was forced to pay opposing attorney fees. He decided to start a tally. But those fees would be just the tip of a quarter-billion-dollar iceberg. The money the state spent on private law firms to defend itself dwarfed that initial amount.

Getting that overall tally was the hard part. When Gary asked what was spent on outside legal counsel during Scott’s half-dozen years in office, the state attorney general told him: “We do not have that information."

So, Gary set out to search through the documents himself, revealing the true cost to taxpayers. For bringing to light a huge chunk of opaque spending and hold state leaders to account, Gary wins this week’s Best of the States.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Trump transition knew Flynn might register as foreign agent

for breaking the story that President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was quietly acknowledging to the Justice Department that he had been paid $530,000 for lobbying up to Election Day on behalf of Turkey's government.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

How hundreds of Texans could have voted improperly

for his exclusive report on how more than 500 Texas voters may have voted improperly during November’s presidential election, and that most would likely face no criminal or civil penalties for doing so. http://wapo.st/2m8HuJw

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Illinois budget fiasco created void in domestic violence funds

for reporting exclusively that Illinois officials had eliminated funding for domestic violence programs and then failed to inform service providers for more than five months, forcing many organizations to abruptly cut staff and other resources. http://trib.in/2lQ9rkL

Best of the States

Utah law allows legislators to get wined and dined in secret

Michelle Price was aware of the Utah’s lax requirements for reporting on lobbying activities and had been looking for a good way to tell that story. A social media posting from a lawmaker gave her the opening she was seeking when he shared an invitation from health care industry lobbyists to legislative members of three health-related committees to dine at a stylish new restaurant.

Price confirmed that under Utah’s loose lobbying laws, neither the lobbyists nor the lawmakers were required to report their night out. Price's AP NewsBreak went on to explain that no public disclosure is required as long as lobbyists extend their largesse to all members of a committee, a task force or a caucus. For her resourceful reporting, Price wins this week’s $300 Best of the States award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP Exclusive: Twin tragedies give survivor a new face

A face transplant: It’s one of the rarest of surgeries, a medically complex, emotionally fraught procedure – and a challenge to cover as a truly revealing news story and not just a sensational headline.

That’s why AP National Writer Sharon Cohen’s narrative of the first face transplant performed at the renowned Mayo Clinic was so remarkable, combining detailed reporting on state-of-the-art medical science with a unique tragedy-to-triumph human story. The narrative, Andy’s New Face, which engaged readers and commanded front pages for days after its release, earns the Beat of the Week.

Best of the Week — First Winner

​All-formats team illuminates why a Democratic stronghold went for Trump

Last November, more than 200 counties across America, scores of them in the upper Midwest, turned from blue to red on the electoral map. Why did voters in once-Democratic strongholds support Donald Trump?

An all-formats AP team of Claire Galofaro, Martha Irvine, David Goldman and Angeliki Kastanis set out to find the answer by focusing on one rural Wisconsin county and getting into the lives and mindset of its people. The result was a revealing package that earns the Beat of the Week.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Trump's voter fraud expert registered in three states

for breaking the news that a man promoted by President Donald Trump as an authority on voter fraud, and who was the source of a claim that 3 million illegal immigrants voted, was himself registered to vote in three states during the 2016 presidential election. http://apne.ws/2kNMmij