for setting the tone for coverage of a breaking news story about the Education Department’s threat to cut funding for a Duke-University of North Carolina program on Middle East studies that it says unfairly emphasizes Islam over Christianity and Judaism.https://bit.ly/2muVlv1
To tell the story of one man’s vision for South Carolina's first civil rights museum, AP wove together text, photos and video to tell the story of efforts to move South Carolina’s first civil rights museum from a photographer’s home into a larger space.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.
exposed how jeweler Cartier used images of Yanomami, a tribe devastated by gold mining, to cast itself in an environmentally conscious light, an “Only on AP” exclusive that led to Cartier taking down a problematic image and saying it had been a mistake.Read more.
traveled 300 miles over muddy tracks and by water via outboard to visit seven villages of an ignored tribe of Kichwa Indigenous people and to hear their testimony about a historic injustice that is also an example of a current trend in climate finance. Tribal members say their historical lands were taken away, throwing them into poverty, to create a national park from which the Peruvian government earns millions in climate carbon credits from faraway oil companies such as Shell and TotalEnergies.Read more.
obtained data across the country to establish the continued popularity of homeschooling for American families — even as schools reopened and vaccines became widely available.Because the federal government does not have a current database of homeschooling numbers, Thompson built her own by reaching out to education departments in all 50 states for their data. She also interviewed families for their perspectives on homeschooling, and used her experience on the education beat to put the trend in the context of homeschooling regulation debates, concerns over neglected students and a broader decline of public school enrollment.Read more
It started with a tip.
When a college student mentioned that fellow unvaccinated students were getting fake COVID-19 vaccine cards in order to attend in-person classes, AP global investigations intern Roselyn Romero remembered that she'd seen an account on Instagram offering fake cards for $25 each.
Romero began searching social media platforms and talked to college students, faculty, administrators and health officials. What she found was a cottage industry offering to accommodate people who refuse to get vaccinated but need documentation saying that they’ve had the shots.
Her deeply reported story had nearly 250,000 pageviews on AP News and was used by hundreds of news outlets, including online and print front pages. She was also interviewed by NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer responded by calling for a multiagency crackdown on the counterfeit cards.
For having a major national impact with her first AP byline, Roselyn Romero wins this week’s Best of the States award.
reported in all formats over several months to tell the important story of women in Malawi going without prenatal care during the pandemic, undoing progress in improving maternal health in one of the world’s poorest nations.The freelance trio’s commitment earned them access to birthing rooms, nursing colleges, and, most challengingly, to camera-averse traditional (and officially illegal) midwives to create a visually powerful, character-driven package. The story was anchored by powerful detail — bus fare to the hospital is more expensive than medical care — and brought to life by intimate photos, including a mother and her newborn minutes after giving birth. In a country where hospitals are so bare that women are expected to bring their own razor blades for cutting their babies’ umbilical cords, the AP showed how deepening poverty brought on by the pandemic is further imperiling women’s lives.The tender, deeply reported package was initiated by photographer Chikondi, with text reporting by Gondwe and video by Jali, the team supported in all formats by AP staffers internationally.https://aplink.news/5ryhttps://aplink.video/8sh
broke the news that Ethiopia has swept up thousands of ethnic Tigrayans into detention centers across the country, often holding them for months and without charges. The disturbing revelations marked the latest installment in AP’s standout coverage of the conflict.The Ethiopian government had acknowledged detaining a small number of high-level military officials from the Tigray minority. But the reporting by Anna, AP East Africa correspondent, found the detentions were far more sweeping and arbitrary, including priests, teachers and nurses. She spoke with 15 detainees and families, including two who were still in detention centers and using smuggled phones. The arbitrary locking up of non-combatants is against international law, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has met with family members of detainees but declined to answer questions. https://bit.ly/3emkCjv
Ethiopia’s military campaign in its defiant Tigray province has been shrouded in secrecy since the conflict started in November, but AP East Africa correspondent Cara Anna has been determined to report what happened in the virtually sealed-off region. She has chased every lead through relentless source work, building contacts and networks as she reported one exclusive after another.
For this latest exclusive, Anna had been hearing rumors of a massacre in the holy city of Axum. When phone service returned to the city recently, she was able to reach the deacon of the Axum church who described in disturbing detail the mass killings by Eritrean troops. He believes some 800 people were killed that weekend at the church and around the city, and that thousands in Axum have died in all. Anna found other survivors who corroborated the deacon’s story and offered additional details.
Her reporting scooped all other media and even human rights groups who had been investigating Axum. It also drew rare and surprisingly quick responses from the governments of both Eritrea and Ethiopia.
For determined and resourceful reporting to break through the secrecy surrounding the Tigray conflict and expose the atrocity at Axum, Anna wins AP’s Best of the Week award.
reported the first detailed account of crimes being committed by Eritrean military forces within Ethiopia’s isolated Tigray region. Journalists following the crisis in the defiant region have struggled to find credible eyewitness accounts of the Eritreans’ presence. But the relentless work by Anna, AP’s East African correspondent based in Kenya, finally paid off: A source put her in touch with a woman, normally a resident of Colorado, who, while on a trip to Ethiopia, witnessed Eritrean troops and their crimes firsthand in the remote village where her mother lives. Anna was able to draw out shocking details of the killing of children, mass graves and the looting of homes.The story, widely used by AP clients, was hailed as the first to document Eritrean activity in Tigray. Anna followed up with a second scoop in which the U.S. State Department called for all Eritrean forces to leave Tigray immediately, citing “credible reports” of atrocities.https://bit.ly/3rqiyuehttps://bit.ly/3cOrDsKhttps://bit.ly/3jeRRpK
has applied relentless drive, journalistic smarts and competitive spirit in her coverage of the conflict between Ethiopia’s federal government and its rebellious Tigray region. A year after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has vowed a “final and crucial” military offensive against Tigray.The story is largely opaque: It has few facts, no death tolls reported, no troop numbers and only hazy social media suggestions of massacres perpetrated in places not found on Google. There is, however, a sea of propaganda and angry words of recrimination from both sides. Through tireless reporting from Kenya, making hundreds of calls to officials, diplomats, aid agencies, diaspora and analysts, through astutely monitoring videos, talking to stringers and parsing through hours of propaganda, Anna has built up a picture of the conflict that, while still a work in progress, is the sharpest and clearest picture available anywhere.https://bit.ly/38RO3HQhttps://bit.ly/3kI89q9https://bit.ly/2IPU11g
followed up on their initial spot story about a Madrid nursing home that became a flash point when the Spanish army found the body of an 84-year-old resident locked in his room at the height of the virus outbreak. The AP team gained the trust of relatives of residents who had died as well as workers from the care home, learning that the 160-bed facility had seen widespread cost cutting for years and that management made a series of highly questionable decisions during the crisis.https://bit.ly/2U9jdCshttps://bit.ly/2XyMf0l
for comprehensive all-formats coverage that enabled AP to dominate the story of two California teenagers arrested in the deadly stabbing of a police officer in Rome. When the story emerged late on a Friday, AP immediately deployed live video and photo to the Carabinieri station where the Americans were being interrogated and staked out the building into the early morning. Other agencies were slow to react. Thanks to excellent teamwork across formats in Rome and with colleagues in California, AP continued to own the story in subsequent days, particularly for video, with unmatched interviews, including an eyewitness account and live coverage of the main suspect’s father arriving in Rome. AP was also aggressive in pursuing photos of the suspects and details of the investigation. https://bit.ly/2TczODshttps://bit.ly/2KwQW35
for revealing that only six of the 35 safety recommendations made after the “Miracle on the Hudson” airliner ditching were implemented. http://dpo.st/2d47oaF
Combine the capabilities of The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity, and this is what you can get: A two-part blockbuster that exposed the efforts of the opioid industry and allied groups to stymie limits on the use of its powerful drugs, and detailed how they spent more than $880 million on lobbying and political contributions over the past decade.
The genesis of the project was a conversation between Tom Verdin, editor of AP’s state government team, and Geoff Mulvihill, a member of that team. Mulvihill, based in Mount Laurel, N.J., has covered the opioid crisis sweeping the nation, and the two hit upon the idea of trying to determine the extent of the pharmaceutical industry’s exerting influence in state legislatures across the country.
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.
It began as an anniversary story, but one that would break news. With North Carolina’s hotly-contested “bathroom bill,” HB2, in place for nearly a year, AP’s Raleigh bureau was asked by the South Desk to assess the economic impact of the law limiting protections for the LGBT community.
Reporters Jonathan Drew and Emery Dalesio created a spreadsheet tallying the results of their digging, including searches of public records, among them previously unseen state calculations of lost business; they interviewed corporate leaders and state and local officials. And they were able to put a hard minimum figure on huge losses to the state economy even as legislators were negotiating a revision of HB2. “The deal was struck,” The New York Times noted, “days after The Associated Press reported that the backlash against the law would cost North Carolina at least $3.7 billion in business over 12 years.”
The timely exclusive by Drew and Dalesio is the Beat of the Week.
for exposing the plight of a prisoner, ill while awaiting extradition to Spain, whose health care was being neglected until AP’s report led a federal judge to intervene and force jailers to get him treatment. https://apnews.com/d2341eaf760a4e76b2b2d4932969def...
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...