Best of the States

All-formats package reveals challenges of rural education during the pandemic

On the sparsely populated fringe of the Navajo Nation, AP Report for America journalist Cedar Attanasio saw a storytelling opportunity: the bus system used by the Cuba, New Mexico, school district to solve distance-learning challenges for some of the country’s most isolated, vulnerable students during the pandemic. 

Reporting for text, photos and video, Attanasio rode one of the school buses used to transport meals, assignments and counselors to remote students, a number of whom do not have electricity, let alone internet. When the bus driver was forced to quarantine, Attanasio took to his car, chasing buses on their routes and interviewing students and their families.

For delivering an insightful multiformat package that reveals the pandemic’s impact on education in a disadvantaged community — prompting one reader to donate $1000 to the school board — Attanasio earns this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the States

Teamwork, enterprise deliver deep coverage on fatal police shooting of Chicago teen

When Chicago police released the body camera video of an officer fatally shooting a 13-year-old boy in an alley, AP staffers in Chicago and across the AP sprang into action with aggressive reporting, sharp enterprise follow-ups and thoughtful standards discussions about how to responsibly portray the gruesome incident for photo and video clients.

The end result was three days of distinctive spot and enterprise coverage on a story that resonated with audiences around the world, especially with renewed focus on police violence in the midst of the Derek Chauvin murder trial.

For comprehensive coverage providing depth, detail and context on the shooting, the all-formats team of Michael Tarm, Don Babwin, Sara Burnett, Kat Stafford, Dave Bauder, Shafkat Anowar, Robert Bumsted and Derek Karikari shares this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the States

AP team embeds in West Virginia city seeing a resurgence of addiction amid the pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic killed more than a half-million Americans, it also quietly inflamed what had already been one of the country’s greatest public health crises: addiction. 

To tell that story, a multiformat AP team — writer Claire Galofaro, photographer David Goldman and video journalist Mike Householder — spent time in Huntington, West Virginia, exploring the resurgence of addiction in a community that had made progress against drug abuse. The AP team embedded with the city’s Quick Response team for a week, providing a unique window into the suffering those with addiction have endured as the pandemic brought despair and cut off access to support systems and health care resources.

The evocative package resonated with readers, and the story’s main subject said she was “ecstatic” over how well the story captured the world she sees every day.

For sensitive and compelling coverage that furthers the AP’s efforts to explore the rippling consequences of COVID-19, the team of Galofaro, Goldman and Householder wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Catholic nuns share their loss and pain of the pandemic

gave voice to the intense emotion within communities of Catholic nuns that have experienced devastating losses from outbreaks of the coronavirus. The Felician Sisters alone lost 21 of their own from four U.S. convents, a remarkable blow for a community of about 450 women. This intimate look within the cloister showed the lasting effects of what the pandemic wrought — in this case, the most reverent found themselves questioning faith and how one might continue living when so many nuns didn’t.After initial difficulty connecting with receptive sources, national writer Sedensky found Sister Mary Jeanine Morozowich in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, who had a level of introspection and eloquence that would help drive this story. That opened the doors to St. Anne Home in Greensburg. Sedensky and video journalist Wardarski, both compassionate listeners, encouraged the openness of the sisters, helping introduce the pair to others at the ministry. “By the time Jessie and I paid a visit there, we were able to share moments and conversations with all of them,” Sedensky said. Along the way, a couple of sisters told him that they felt better after their conversations.The package, including Wardarski’s poignant visuals, found a receptive audience. The AP pair received innumerable emails expressing how much the story moved readers. One was headlined: “My tears flowed as I read your article.” Another said: “Your article about the loss of these beautiful women will stay with me always. ... You wrote it so beautifully and with such respect.”https://bit.ly/3g8vYsGhttps://bit.ly/3gdjJeh

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP examines vaccine inequity for already marginalized workers

teamed up with international colleagues for a compelling account of vaccine inequity in India, Africa and Latin America, exposing the plight of an estimated 20 million informal waste workers who keep cities clean and divert waste away from landfills but are not yet eligible to get the coronavirus vaccine.Health and science reporter Ghosal was exploring vaccine policy in India when he was stuck by the sheer invisibility of the scavengers who live on the fringes, far from the public discourse around who should be prioritized for vaccination. Ghosal worked with photographer Qadri and video journalist Ganguly for on-the-ground reporting at the massive garbage mountain on the outskirts of New Delhi. They came back with moving personal stories that added depth to the narrative, with powerful visuals laying bare the workers’ experience amid grinding poverty.To amplify the work, Ghosal reached out to colleagues across Africa and in Latin America, who shared similar accounts of exclusion and deep-rooted inequalities in access to health care. They delivered, adding to a story that included contributions by Brian Inganga and Tom Odula in Nairobi, Farai Mutsaka in Zimbabwe, Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg, Marco Ugarte in Mexico City, Ariana Cubillos in Venezuela and Manish Swarup in New Delhi.The arresting all-formats package highlighted how the pandemic has exacerbated existing income inequalities. The words and images of trash pickers wearing discarded protective suits in Nairobi, and scavengers plunging their bare hands into thousands of tons of garbage in New Delhi, reveal a community of marginalized workers who struggle to get vaccinated despite providing a service many consider essential.https://bit.ly/3utbKO7https://bit.ly/3fNIDAZhttps://bit.ly/2R8XA6l

Best of the States

AP all-formats team looks at town’s Black reparations through the eyes of a retired professor

When the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, began taking a hard look at paying reparations to Black residents, the AP's Boston bureau set about using it as a backdrop for a national look at where things stand on making amends for the lingering effects of slavery.

The team of video journalist Rodrique Ngowi, reporter Philip Marcelo and photographer Charlie Krupa soon found the perfect subject to make the project character-centered: 96-year-old former University of Massachusetts professor Edwin Driver, who arrived on campus in the 1940s as one of the nation’s first Black faculty members at a flagship university — only to find no one would sell him a house. He said he was denied pay raises for decades.

The all-formats team came away with a powerful and illuminating portrait of a Black man who'd been wronged — a compelling way to frame the earnest but complicated public effort to address injustice. 

For impactful and highly visual storytelling that helped put a face on a provocative and politically charged issue — one the nation will be wrestling with for years to come — Ngowi, Krupa and Marcelo earn the week’s Best of the States honors.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: One man’s fight against an oil pipeline on his land

reported on a land grab for a proposed oil pipeline, conveying the news in the most compelling way possible, from the perspective of the people involved. The story is told largely through the eyes of Clyde Robinson, a 80-year-old Memphis, Tennessee, landowner fighting against larger forces to keep his land in what advocates say is textbook environmental racism.Robinson, who is Black, compared the effort to seize his land through eminent domain to slavery, when members of his own family were not compensated for their work. He vowed that no amount of money would convince him to change his mind.Environmental lawyers who have taken up Robinson’s cause say there’s no public interest that would justify seizure of the land for a business project, while a spokeswoman for the pipeline project walked back a statement by a land agent that the company had chosen “a point of least resistance” for the pipeline's proposed path. That statement was interpreted by the project’s opponents as having discriminatory undertones. https://bit.ly/3bDr1VZ

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Juke joint package captures Grammy-nominated bluesman

teamed up to tell the moving story of a Mississippi blues artist who is keeping a musical tradition alive. Reporter Willingham couldn’t find a phone number for Grammy-nominated Jimmy “Duck” Holmes — musician, owner of the oldest-surviving juke joint in the country and the keeper of the unique Bentonia, Mississippi, blues musical tradition — so she set off to find him and interview him in the Blue Front Café. She then returned twice for more interviews, details of Holmes’ daily life, and impressive visuals by photographer Solis and video journalist Plaisance Jenkins. The all-formats package brought attention to Holmes’ rich musical contributions and conveyed a strong sense of place — Holmes’ café isn’t just a music spot but a part of the fabric of the close-knit community. The story had some 23,000 pageviews on AP News with remarkably high reader engagement.https://bit.ly/2OOQF1ihttps://bit.ly/3rGnewG

Best of the States

AP team finds diversity of politics and religion among West Virginia evangelicals

A tweet was the seed for this illuminating story. “Most people in my rural, Appalachian hometown are being radicalized at church by their pastor, which is the person they trust the most,” it read. AP’s Global Religion team ran with it.

Reporter Luis Andres Henao and visual journalist Jessie Wardarski visited the parishioners of three churches in Bluefield, West Virginia, including one pastor who had attended the Jan. 6 Washington rally that degenerated into a riot. The AP pair spent weeks convincing him to sit down for an interview. The result was an all-formats package of diverse congregations seeking common ground, even as they are divided on the role of evangelical Christianity in American politics. 

For applying gentle persuasion and balanced reporting to produce a nuanced look at religion and politics in one West Virginia town, Henao and Wardarski win this week’s Best of the States award. 

Best of the States

Joint investigation reveals ‘leadership vacuum’ after backlash against public health officials

AP reporter Michelle Smith was working on another project in June when she came up with the names of a dozen or so public health officials who had quit, retired or been fired. Sensing a trend, Smith and reporters at Kaiser Health News continued to track those departures as the pandemic worsened and the backlash against public health restrictions became more strident.

The journalists contacted officials in all 50 states and interviewed dozens of people, finding a public health leadership vacuum developing at a critical time in the pandemic. They told the stories of public servants who toiled through the pandemic only to be reviled by their neighbors — including the wrenching story of an official whose husband would not even follow her recommendation to require masks in the family store. The timely all-formats story included a data distribution, interactive graphics and a sidebar with portraits and quotes of public health officials. 

For a deeply reported package that examines a vital component of the pandemic response, Smith, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Hannah Recht and Lauren Weber earn this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the States

The cost of Trump environmental rollbacks: Health woes hit minority communities hardest

With African American and Hispanic communities in the Houston region already suffering higher rates of asthma and other diseases than the nation at large, AP’s Ellen Knickmeyer decided to focus on the area for a story on ordinary Americans living through the Trump administration’s public health and environmental rollbacks. 

The administration was cutting back on rules limiting and monitoring harmful industrial pollutants, slashing enforcement and weakening an industrial-disaster rule.

Knickmeyer, a Washington-based environmental issues reporter, spent months searching out Houston residents, telling their stories along with deep reporting on the regulatory actions and their consequences.

Former EPA Director Gina McCarthy was among many retweeting the story, calling it a “must read” article.

For a rich, insightful look at the consequences of the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks on vulnerable communities, Knickmeyer wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

In the time of coronavirus, AP finds a racial divide — and love

vividly reported one couple’s story of what love looks like in the time of coronavirus. But in a twist, they also looked at divisions of race, and how white and black residents in Mississippi see the virus quite differently. Sensitively told with intimate attention to detail, the story humanized the trauma caused by the virus with the universal and age-old appeal of a love story. But it also skillfully wove in the numbers about race and the virus in Mississippi – showing how the coronavirus disproportionately impacted the Black community, and how that community has largely been more focused on prevention than their white neighbors.The story engaged readers and viewers, and it received more than 1,100 retweets, from a New York Times editor to the Montgomery Advertiser to Mike Barnicle, the famously crusty Boston newspaperman and NBC correspondent.https://bit.ly/32ggrPFhttps://bit.ly/366xQvqhttps://bit.ly/38fWZ9w

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Black churches adapt to mobilize voters during pandemic

produced a deep, well-sourced multimedia package showing how – with its disproportionate effect on the Black community – the coronavirus outbreak is forcing Black churches to change the way they mobilize voters during an election that many see as a tipping point.Every major election year, the voter mobilization in Black churches known as “souls to the polls” is a cornerstone of get-out-the-vote efforts that can tip the outcome in close races. But to keep this bedrock tradition alive during the pandemic, Black church communities have had to adapt. New York-based race and ethnicity reporter Aaron Morrison led an AP team in a nationwide look at a this year’s revamped souls-to-the-polls strategy. https://bit.ly/34iHcVhhttps://bit.ly/3jkE7bt

Best of the States

Amid heightened racial tensions, ‘Looking for America’ series examines ‘sundown towns’

Many white Americans have likely never heard of “sundown towns,” where Black people were once forbidden after dark. So Tim Sullivan, Noreen Nasir and Maye-E Wong visited one such town, Vienna, Illinois, on the second stop in AP’s “Looking for America” series, to see how it is faring in a year marked by racial protests.

While there is no longer a rule against Black people in Vienna after sunset, the habit persists for many out of fear and tradition. With deep reporting and compelling visuals, the AP team captured a lingering racial divide that is obvious to some people but virtually invisible to others. 

For a probing but nuanced package that speaks to a thread of systemic racism, the all-formats team of Sullivan, Nasir and Wong earns this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP looks at the Black Lives Matter conversation in rural Kentucky

added nuance and depth to AP’s coverage of national protests over the killing of Breonna Taylor by defying stereotypes about Blacks living in Appalachia, and offering reasons for hope that racial progress is possible in the region.In a story that captured the complexity of multiple fault lines of ethnicity and class – including preconceived notions about white Appalachians – the Report for America journalist examined the perspective of young Black people living in the mountains who have found hope in the national reckoning on race. https://bit.ly/2SDk5xM

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Documenting the border’s ‘forgotten frontier’ in the pandemic

used exclusive hospital access and character-driven all-formats storytelling to reveal the impact of the coronavirus on Imperial County, an often overlooked majority Latino community on the California-Mexico border, already affected poverty, air pollution, lack of health care and a border crossed by thousands daily. The team’s all-formats package, used widely across the country, evoked empathy and shed light on how such communities are exceptionally vulnerable to the virus.https://bit.ly/3gXdOYnhttps://bit.ly/31Re9Fw

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Immersive look at Facebook groups targeting Black Lives Matter

studied Facebook groups that opposed coronavirus shutdowns, finding that they shifted their target to the Black Lives Matter movement. Acting on a tip that such groups have a history of fundraising off hot-button issues, Seitz developed a database to track the groups, immersing herself in the online community to monitor misinformation and hate speech as the groups turned their attention against the Black Lives activism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.The day after Amanda’s story was published, Facebook began suppressing search results for some of the groups mentioned in her story in an effort to limit their reach.https://bit.ly/30179p1

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Inside New York’s Latino congregations, united in grief

produced an important collection of three multiformat stories bringing to light the decimation occurring in New York’s Latino population, and especially the vibrant undocumented immigrant community that is among the most religious – but also the hardest hit segment during the pandemic.

The team first told the story of two congregations united in grief: Between them, the two churches have lost more than 100 members to the virus. They then took a poignant look at a priest who has endured the loss of his mentor, his father and congregation members. https://bit.ly/2ZksJpEhttps://bit.ly/3cW8ySQhttps://bit.ly/2LMVbZhhttps://bit.ly/3cTzenb

Best of the States

Inside the Navajo Nation as it endures the coronavirus outbreak

If the Navajo Nation were its own state, it would have the second highest per-capita rate of coronavirus cases in the United States, trailing only New York. 

AP’s Felicia Fonseca, one of the preeminent reporters covering Native issues for any news organization, and photographer Carolyn Kaster reported from the heart of the crisis. Donning full protective gear and a healthy measure of courage, they documented families, doctors and volunteers, while national writer Tim Sullivan added further reporting and masterful writing assistance from afar. 

The story and photos capture the vast beauty of the land and the intimate grief of the people, including one family that has lost four members to the virus. The package played heavily in the Southwest U.S. and was among AP’s most downloaded and viewed for several days.

For a revealing look at a Native community in the midst of the health crisis, Fonseca, Kaster and Sullivan share this week’s Best of the States honors.

Best of the Week — First Winner

What went wrong: AP examines how COVID-19 swept Italy’s Lombardy region

A scathing letter sent in early April by doctors in Italy’s Lombardy region provided the first tangible inkling that something had gone terribly wrong in its fight against the coronavirus.

With Lombardy accounting for roughly half of Italy’s 27,000 deaths, chief Rome correspondent Nicole Winfield set out to document how the virus overwhelmed a medical system long considered one of Europe’s best.

Over the next three weeks, Winfield methodically collected details, conducted interviews, pored over government reports and briefings, and referenced AP’s vast reporting on the pandemic to craft the first explanatory account of the missteps and failures that allowed the virus to become so pervasive in northern Italy.

Winfield’s story quickly became one of the most-read on the AP News and was picked up by outlets globally.

For crafting a thorough, compelling and heartbreaking account of how COVID-19 got a pervasive, deadly grip on Lombardy, Winfield wins AP’s Best of the Week honors.