AP provided excellent breaking and in-depth news coverage of Hurricane Idalia and the aftermath with unique video, compelling photos and textured stories of the storm.Read more
A cross-team collaboration about a dozen years in the making pays off despite threats from a tropical storm and deadly wildfire, resulting in a tale of the widespread devotion to two Catholic saints who cared for patients banished to Hawaii’s leprosy colony.Read more
AP produced an exclusive photo, won record-breaking video usage and dominated global coverage of far-right firebrand Geert Wilders’ unexpected electoral win, thanks to expert planning, quick thinking and deep knowledge of Dutch politics.Read more
An AP enterprise team talked to people across the United States to see what nearly unfettered gun rights mean to the rest of their freedoms.Read more
AP produced a deep all-formats package about a community that serves as a model for what others could do with proceeds from a $50 billion opioids settlement to fight the opioids epidemic.Read more
It started as a vague alert of a shooting in Maine. But within minutes of learning about it, Portland-based correspondent David Sharp had guidance that at least 16 people were dead. He knew that would make it the state’s deadliest shooting by far.
Even before the first AP alert went out, Sharp and Robert Bukaty were headed to Lewiston, where a gunman had opened fire in a bowling area and bar and then vanished into the night. They were the first national news crew to arrive, coming up live for video and filing the first images of the aftermath.
Sharp’s video interview with a shoeless man who hid in the machinery of the bowling alley as people died around him was among the first eyewitness accounts, getting wide usage by clients including The New York Times.
Ultimately, 18 people would die, and residents would stay locked inside their homes for days.
Throughout the following days, a crew of journalists shared responsibilities and information in Lewiston and beyond, including AP’s breaking news investigations team of Bernard Condon and Jim Mustian who exclusively reported that Maine police were alerted as recently as September to “veiled threats” by the U.S. Army reservist.
AP’s story, which was matched — with credit — over the next day by both The New York Times and CNN, marked the most detailed reporting yet on the contact law enforcement had with the gunman, who killed himself.
The cross-format, cross-department collaboration on this story was flawless and a demonstration of AP at its best. For aggressive breaking news reporting and investigations, we are delighted to award New England’s staff, Mike Balsamo, Alanna Durkin Durkin Richer, Lindsay Whitehurst, Condon and Mustian for the Best of the Week Award — First Winner.
With a display of lightning-fast collaboration, AP was the first news organization to report that a Maryland judge who was shot to death in his driveway had presided over the divorce case of a man identified as a suspect in his killing.Read more
AP showed how a drumbeat of arcane and esoteric studies about ancient DNA had larger implications — and delightful, surprising findings — that impact all of us living today.Read more
AP employed the traditional Afghan “box camera” to document how life has changed in Afghanistan in peacetime, for better and worse, two years after U.S. troops left and the Taliban returned to power.Read more
An AP team highlighted the disproportionate effect of cash bail as a condition of pretrial release on people of color ahead of Illinois’ historic elimination of the system through stories of residents who lost jobs, homes and time with young children due to being unable to afford bail amounts.Read more
Sydney investigative correspondent Kristen Gelineau, who has covered the Rohingya crisis since 2017, heard from a young Rohingya source about a surge in people leaving a camp in Bangladesh. And then one boat vanished.
Two sources confirmed that they’d heard about the boat vanishing. There was no official investigation — and not a single word had been written about the missing migrants.
It took two months of all-out lobbying, calling in favors from every contact in Bangladesh, to finally get a visa to go. Gelineau left 48 hours later, and Dhaka video journalist Al-emrun Garjon and photographer Mahmud Hossain Opu joined her. There were so many families desperate to talk that the AP journalists literally had a line of them waiting to speak. Many were in tears, clutching photos of their lost loved ones. Huge credit goes to our Rohingya sources, who literally risked their lives to get the truth out about this boat — tracking down sources, triple-checking facts, translating. We cannot name them for their safety, but we very much want to acknowledge them.
McKinnon de Kuyper put together the heartbreaking video, which included the call from the woman on the boat and the story was our most engaged on AP digital platforms for the day, with a perfect engagement score of 100.
For persistence in telling a story that might otherwise have remained untold, Gelineau, Garjon, Opu, de Kuyper and anonymous stringers in Bangladesh with this week’s first citation for Best of the Week.
AP explored how bananas and cocaine end up inside the same shipping containers for transatlantic trips to European ports, why the ubiquitous fruit has become a favorite of drug traffickers, and what Ecuador’s main port city feels like as crime and violence transforms people’s lives.Read more
AP covered 64 Women’s World Cup matches over two countries and four time zones.Read more
On the eve of the first world track championships since Bowie’s passing, AP sportswriters Eddie Pells and Pat Graham teamed up to report exclusively on the mental health struggles of Tori Bowie that led up to the star athlete’s death April 23 from complications during childbirth at the age of 32.
The two had covered Bowie, who won three medals at the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Games, for many years and had heard whispers of her difficulties. A few weeks after her death, the autopsy listed the cause as “complications in childbirth.”
While other outlets pursued the angle that Black women suffer disproportionately from pregnancy complications, Pells opted to explore another dimension of her story, her struggles with mental health.
He sought out people at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and within track and field, to find out how a world-famous champion, who was eight months into what would be considered an at-risk pregnancy, came to die alone at home without medical care or anyone to look after her.
For sensitively telling the story of a great athlete who became isolated from her peers and died tragically alone in part because of neglect of her mental health difficulties, Pells and Graham are Best of the Week — First Winner.
When a wildfire broke out in Maui and obliterated the centuries-old town of Lahaina, staff in AP’s Pacific Northwest sprang into action. Honolulu’s Audrey McAvoy was on the ground within hours, leveraging the AP’s unique Hawaii footprint for the first of many days of aggressive coverage that allowed AP to own the story from the beginning.
McAvoy was quickly joined by Portland, Oregon, reporter Claire Rush, who canceled her vacation; photographer Rick Bowmer and video journalists Ty O’Neil and Haven Daley. Jennifer Kelleher joined the reporting effort from Honolulu, where she anchored the story for days with help from Chris Weber in Los Angeles and worked longtime sources, including Gov. Josh Green, to keep AP ahead. Rush, O’Neil and Bowmer slept in an SUV for two days in the burn zone.
On Aug. 9, apnews.com received 7.6 million page views — a new record and a 32% increase over traffic the previous Wednesday, and the following day also broke previous records with 7.5 million page views.
The Live Updates fixture, artfully anchored by a changing cast of characters, was also a huge winner for AP and served as a “search tree” that led readers back to AP’s content again and again.
For extraordinary coverage of the devastating fire, accomplished despite huge logistical challenges, the AP Maui team earns Best of the Week — First Winner.
Migration-focused video journalist Renata Brito in Barcelona took note of a heartbreaking photo on social media to spark a story about the situation at the Tunisia-Libya border — and she used her years of source work, expertise on the border and help from around AP to confirm the story.
On July 19, the photo of a woman and child lying dead, barefoot and face down in the tawny desert sand began circulating on social media. It was retweeted by activists who accused Tunisia of abandoning migrants to their fates on the other side of Tunisia’s desert border with Libya.
But little was known about the photo or the stories of the two who had died.
On social media, some said the photo spoke to that growing crisis, but others insisted it was an old image from another country.
Three days after the photo surfaced, a source of Brito’s in Libya messaged her, saying he knew the woman and child in the photo. From afar, Brito had developed a relationship with the source for years. For this story, Brito asked the source: How did he know it was them? Could she speak to friends or family? With whom did they travel?
That resulted in a tale of dashed hope and tragedy as told to the AP by the late woman’s husband, with additional details and key context contributed by Elaine Ganley and Samy Magdy, who together are Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP has owned the story since Russia and Ukraine signed a landmark grain distribution deal a year ago that cleared the way for Ukraine to export its grain across the Black Sea to the rest of the world.Read more
brought new light to the story.Read more.
AP staff and freelancers scrambled to Florida and set up an ad hoc newsroom inside and outside the federal courthouse in Miami, and many others in Washington, U.S. News and beyond dove in to provide support and expertise after the surprise news that the Trump documents case had been moved from Washington to Florida by prosecutors.Read more
centered LGBTQ+ students and kids of color in a powerful story to show the impact of GOP efforts against inclusion at schools.Read more.
