AP writer Gisela Salomon profiled immigrants who benefited from four previous major waves of immigration parole — Hungary in 1956, Vietnam in 1975, Cuba in 1980 and Venezuela in 2023 — to show how the U.S. policy has evolved over seven decades.Read more
Three members of the AP Washington bureau collaborated on a deeply reported, comprehensive and all-formats look at how Iran, China and other adversaries stalk, intimidate and harass activists and dissidents living in the United States.Read more
AP provided fast live video and compelling eyewitness accounts after the deadliest attack on U.S. law enforcement since 2016.Read more
White House Correspondent Zeke Miller, Latin America Correspondent Joshua Goodman, Investigative Reporter Jim Mustian and Washington Reporter Lindsay Whitehurst combined forces to exclusively break the news that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, a historic shift that could clear the way toward easing federal criminal penalties on pot at a time when President Joe Biden is seeking the support of younger voters.
The DEA’s biggest policy recommendation in its 50-year history had been highly anticipated and hotly contested by every major news organization. In the end, AP’s bombshell story last Tuesday left competitors scrambling to match AP’s reporting and give AP full credit for being first.
But AP wasn’t done. In the ensuing hours there was another APNewsAlert on Attorney General Merrick Garland endorsing the DEA proposal, a politics sidebar by Jonathan J. Cooper on how this is Biden’s latest attempt to reach out to younger voters and a “What It Means” glance by Jennifer Peltz and Whitehurst that unpacked the nuances of the order. That was also neatly presented in an AP video narrated by Whitehurst.
For strong, fast, exclusive reporting that put the AP out front to drive the conversation on a historic policy shift on pot, Miller, Goodman, Mustian and Whitehurst are Best of the Week — First Winner.
In an exclusive based on documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, Washington-based health policy reporter Amanda Seitz reported on complaints that pregnant women were being turned away from emergency rooms in the months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, despite federal law requiring that they be treated.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act was seen as a safety net to ensure that pregnant women experiencing a medical emergency could get abortions in states where the procedure had been banned. But Seitz set out to find out if it really was. She submitted a FOIA request in February 2023 seeking information about pregnancy-related complaints under the federal law.
After almost a year of waiting, the FOIA office finally agreed to release records but said it would take another four years to get the documents. With a crucial U.S. Supreme Court case pending, Seitz negotiated a limited release of documents in certain states.
In March, she finally got what she was looking for: a rundown of complaints about violations in the months after Roe was overturned in 2022. The documents showed a spike in the number of complaints post-Roe and included horrific accounts of pregnant women receiving improper care. But they left open the question of what penalties ERs were facing for violating the law.
While many other news organizations wrote about the upcoming Supreme Court arguments on the EMTALA law, because of Seitz the AP was alone with the details about the complaints spiking. She is Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP’s story illustrates how evolving state legislation on physician-assisted death impacts Americans.Read more
In a rare account from an under-reported country, AP told the story of an active militia fighter working with Russia’s Wagner mercenaries bringing insights into the challenges of demobilizing in a nation still in conflict.Read more
AP presented a unique spin on daylight saving time by exploring a corner of Arizona where one Native American tribe changes clocks but a neighboring one doesn’t.Read more
In the runup to Super Tuesday, The Associated Press showed why it’s at the top of the class when it comes to elections coverage.
As Super Tuesday neared, the AP had an issue on its hands: how will it call races that night when it would have no VoteCast poll — but the TV networks had their exit polling, which could have put the AP at a competitive disadvantage? Serena Hawkins, data scientist for AP’s Decision Team, got to work.
In just two weeks, she researched, developed, tested and deployed a new approach to race calling that allowed the AP to declare Donald Trump and Joe Biden winners in several states with a very small return of counted votes.
That new model, used by the AP on Super Tuesday, put AP’s race calls ahead in states where the TV networks didn’t have a poll, and only a few minutes behind in states where they did — and with no errors in its calls.
Meanwhile, the AP, for the first time, was able to deliver its vote count directly to news consumers through a new immersive elections experience on APNews.
The effort was captained by development lead Linda Gorman, with team members Ryan Best, Michelle Minkoff Carlson, Chaithra Chandraiah, Shelly Cheng, Chad Day, Phil Holm, Dan Kempton, Humera Lodhi, Maya Sweedler, Pablo Barria Urenda and Robert Weston. On the night of Super Tuesday, the recirculation rate for these pages was, in a word, stratospheric.
For all these reasons, Serena Hawkins and the Elections Data Visualizations Team are Best of the Week — First Winner.
Race and Ethnicity team contributors pitched a story about what union membership has meant to generations of Black families within days of United Auto Workers’ announcement that members would walk off the job at a Ford plant in Michigan.Read more
AP turned what would’ve been a mundane story into a riveting tale of a family’s longing to have something — anything — to bury of their deceased loved one.Read more
Sharp beat work and a keen news sense helped AP elevate routine Legislative coverage of a drug bill into an all-formats feature that used the gut-wrenching story of a tribe that’s losing one member a week to opioid overdose to illustrate why readers should care about an obscure bill overlooked by every other media outlet.Read more
The expertise of AP’s team and detailed advanced planning allowed the AP to dominate coverage of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case to determine whether Donald Trump can remain on the ballot.Read more
AP’s exclusive, deep-dive analysis of Donald Trump’s civil fraud case in New York found that if the judge carries through with his sentence to “dissolve” the former president’s business empire, it would stand apart in nearly 70 years of the state’s powerful anti-fraud law. Read more
After hearing special prosecutors say they’d seek to bring a case against Alec Baldwin before a grand jury around mid-November 2023, AP dived into understanding the process to position itself to break the news.Read more
AP took a look at how while millions of people worldwide don’t have clean water to drink, luxury water brands have emerged for the world’s wealthy and elite.Read more
AP scored an exclusive interview with a candidate in the state’s high-stakes legislative elections who was revealed during the campaign to have once live-streamed sex videos with her husband on a pornographic website.Read more
