stood out amid competition with comprehensive coverage of disruptions to the lives of residents in a remote Taiwan-ruled island. Situated less than 20 miles off the coast of mainland China, the residents were left stranded without internet for over a month after submarine internet cables were cut off.Read more.
used persistence and thoughtfulness to gain access to a drug treatment van and its patients.Read more.
came together in all formats to dominate coverage of Typhoon Mawar’s direct hit on Guam.Read more.
The coronation of King Charles III posed huge logistical challenges for the AP to cover, especially for those stuck outside enduring hours of soaking rain. But collaboration among dozens of AP staff, led by reporter Danica Kirka, videojournalist Kwiyeon Ha, photographer Alastair Grant, photo editor Anne-Marie Belgrave, Special Events Editor Susie Blann and Senior Producer Maria Grazia Murru, resulted in two weeks of exemplary all-formats storytelling, topped by the spectacular crowning itself.
The results showed: explanatory and feature-driven journalism in the lead-up to the wall-to-wall coverage on the day and weekend. Kirka’s knowledge from years working the royal beat enabled AP to offer clients a variety of stories covering the king and queen's profiles, the Windsor family drama, the clouds over the Commonwealth, the future of the monarchy, the economy and much more.
The weather and limited access on May 6 threw up several challenges. The team overcame them all to participate in huge video and photo pool operations while providing unique AP unilateral coverage from the best camera positions.
For the story told deeply, colorfully and powerfully across all formats, Kirka, Ha, Grant, Belgrave, Blann and Murru, with dozens of others contributing, earn Best of the Week — First Winner.
chronicled gun protests that led to two Black state lawmakers being expelled from the Tennessee state legislature.Read more.
got unique access in the U.S. to hours of interviews with one of the few high-level elite Russian security officers around President Vladimir Putin to defect.Read more.
explained how professors, students and their families at the small, liberal arts New College of Florida are having their lives shaken up after the school came under attack from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “woke.”Read more.
exclusively reported about the background of the special prosecutor appointed to lead the case of five white officers charged in the deadly 2019 arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene.
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led AP’s efforts to get the fastest and most comprehensive coverage of a federal judge’s hearing questioning the legality of access to medical abortions.Read more.
AP boasts about its global reach. An all-formats package reported from Iraq demonstrates how the deep expertise of its journalists also reaches back through history.
We have an amazing team that covers Iraq day in and day out. But we also have a hidden resource: people who were there when history happened and are with us today. When we see the opportunity, we can offer our readers and customers that context. That was the case with Jerome Delay and John Daniszewski, both of whom were there in 2003 at the beginning of it all. They went back to offer some context about what has changed.
Delay and Daniszewski were both among the few international journalists in Baghdad when the U.S. launched its “shock and awe” campaign. They joined with video journalist Lujain Jo, a native Iraqi, and video journalist Jerry Marmer, who was embedded with Marines who invaded by land 20 years ago, to deliver an authoritative and nuanced portrait of a country that’s been out of the spotlight since the defeat of the Islamic State group five years ago.
Instead of focusing solely on the war-torn image that many Iraqis say is outdated, the AP team’s package also focused on what’s ahead for Iraq. Beyond exclusive interviews with the Iraqi president and prime minister, they also conducted dozens of interviews with Iraqi youth. These gave a deeper and sometimes counterintuitive look at a generation interrupted by war and terrorism, whose voices are rarely heard outside their home country. Half of Iraq’s population of 40 million is too young to remember Saddam Hussein.
For their sensitive and forward-looking view of an invasion that hit Iraq 20 years in the past, bolstered by their own lived experiences of it, Delay, Daniszewski, Jo and Harmer are this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
Some likened it to a Renaissance painting – and it certainly belongs in a museum. We’re talking, of course, about Andrew Harnik’s indelible images of a tussle in Congress as a historic House speaker vote threatened to stretch into another week.
As Republicans struggled through 14 fruitless rounds of voting against an internal faction of rebels to elect Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker, the longest such struggle in a century, nerves were fraying.
But AP’s photographers in the chamber remained cool as ever.
Normally, photographers’ access in the House chamber is heavily restricted by the speaker’s office – but with no speaker, the photo team was able to take full advantage of a House with no rules. Able to freely roam the chamber and capture up-close moments, the team shot more than 14,000 images for review and editing. Over the four days of voting, 1,500 images moved to AP’s audiences.
Alex Brandon captured an image of Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of the last anti-McCarthy holdouts, talking tensely with McCarthy after the 14th vote. With most cameras trained on McCarthy, Harnik captured an unbelievable-if-it-weren’t-on-camera near-brawl, as Rep. Mike Rogers started to charge toward Gaetz – only to be pulled back by Rep. Richard Hudson.
That image, which quickly became iconic, and the work of the others in the AP photo team, earns Best of the Week – First Winner honors for Harnik, Applewhite, Brandon, Cortez, Kaster, Rourke and Walsh.
of the democracy team put AP out front on a story about conspiracy theories prompting Republican election officials to defect from a system that combats voter fraud in the U.S.Read more.
reported in all formats, before any other international media, about a relatively new phenomenon in Argentina: pregnant Russians traveling to Buenos Aires after the war in Ukraine to give birth in the South American country and being able to get an Argentina passport to have access to 171 countries without a visa.Read more.
With no end in sight to Russia’s war in Ukraine, AP journalists were tasked with marking the one-year anniversary of the invasion while continuing to produce daily coverage. The result was an ambitious, wide-ranging package that both promoted and built upon the important work AP teams have done over the past year.
The process began months in advance, with AP reporters in Kyiv, Moscow and Tallinn devising a list of story ideas that would aim to show how profoundly lives have changed in Ukraine and Russia and the ripples beyond those borders. The journalists also looked at what could lie in store as we enter a second year of war.
Weeks of smart planning and coordination across bureaus and departments resulted in a strong, competitive package that included something for everyone. Erika Kinetz had an exclusive centered around secret recordings the AP obtained of intercepted conversations between Russian soldiers and their loved ones, which became AP’s most engaged story for the month. Additionally, the AP was also able to offer exclusively commissioned drone footage and, thanks to herculean efforts by staff in Ukraine, live coverage from various locations on the day of the anniversary.
For rich, thorough, revealing and thoughtful coverage of the anniversary, the Ukraine war anniversary team is this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
More than a dozen AP journalists worked non-stop with translators and drivers, crisscrossing a battered landscape, driving on icy roads for up to 10 hours on any given day to reach some of the hard-hit areas. They defied freezing temperatures to capture the big and the small: the scale of the destruction, and the tales of hope that came with each and every new rescue.
The 7.8 earthquake and the ensuing 7.5 temblor that followed struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on Feb. 6. It will go down in history as the deadliest natural disaster in modern times in a region already battered by years of conflict.
Years of experience working in Turkey, Syria and Lebanon translated into a quick response in the field and aggressive reporting under extremely challenging circumstances.
For their extraordinary display of bravery, skill and dedication, AP’s Turkey and Syria earthquake teams are this week’s Best of the Week – First Winner.
From Turkey’s capital, Ankara, to the earthquake’s hardest-hit Hatay province to rebel-held northwestern Syria, AP journalists worked day and night, risking injury and worse, to produce heart wrenching coverage.
For their extraordinary display of bravery, skill and dedication, AP’s Turkey and Syria earthquake teams are this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
reported first that the only Black designer on the Italian fashion council, Stella Dean, quit Milan fashion week over the lack of diversity, signaling the end of nearly three years of collaboration with the council on promoting young designers of color.Read more.
teamed up on a multiformat package highlighting an issue that is typically under covered at the national level: the effects of gerrymandering on local governments.Read more.
Reporters Hannah Schoenbaum and Lea Skene exclusively obtained the death certificate of pro-Trump commentator, Lynnette "Diamond" Hardaway to help dispel rumors and misinformation running wild on social media. After Hardaway’s sister falsely implied that a COVID vaccine had played a role during a livestreamed memorial, AP used restraint by deciding not to write about what was said about the cause of death at the memorial while waiting for an official autopsy or death certificate that the reporters had already requested. Read more.
The best portraits capture a person’s essence, almost always by focusing on the human face. But AP photographer Ebrahim Noroozi, on assignment in Kabul temporarily from Iran, needed to do something different to show the effects of Afghanistan’s rule banning women playing sports.
Using the emblematic burqa to conceal the identities of the women athletes now forbidden from doing what they love best, Noroozi came up with the haunting series of faceless portraits to illustrate the erasure of Afghan women from public life under the Taliban.
Several female athletes who once played a variety of sports unrestricted posed for Noroozi with their athletic equipment – and their identities hidden by burqas, the all-encompassing robe and hood that completely covers the face, leaving only a swath of mesh to see through.
Noroozi’s images were published in an array of multimedia presentations by AP’s subscribers worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. The latter used them to illustrate a story about the near-simultaneous decision by Australia to cancel a men’s one-day international cricket series over the restrictions on women.
For innovation and sensitivity in showing a difficult subject, Noroozi earns Best of the Week – First Winner.
on the ground in Las Vegas drove unprecedented audience engagement for the annual CES tech show, where more than 3,000 companies push their innovations. AP provided comprehensive coverage that touched on the metaverse, sustainability, the future of electric vehicles, the economic climate for startups and more. There were dozens of video edits, at least a dozen lives, hundreds of photos, and daily roundups of the coolest, most buzz-worthy tech, all curated on the Technology hub of APnews.com.Read more.
