Best of the Week — First Winner

AP examines patient consent before pelvic exams; states, med schools split on legislation

“Don’t dismiss a [story] idea just because it’s unfamiliar. Pelvic exams aren’t exactly in the wheelhouse of the State Government Team, but it turned out to be a really terrific and distinctive topic.”

That’s one editor’s takeaway from a story by Providence, Rhode Island, reporter Jennifer McDermott and Seattle medical writer Carla Johnson, both of whom, acting on a heads-up from New York photo editor Jenny Kane, found that it’s common practice for medical students to perform a pelvic exam on women under anesthesia as part of their training. Whether the patients have given consent for that exam is not clear, drawing the interest of state lawmakers.

The pair faced multiple obstacles in reporting the story, including initial reluctance by doctors and harried legislators to discuss the issue, but McDermott and Johnson succeeded in defining the conflict between medical schools and elected officials seeking to protect patient rights. Their efforts resulted in a unique story that received heavy play among major AP customers, both online and in print.

For their teamwork, execution and sensitive handling of a complex topic, McDermott, Johnson and Kane win AP’s Best of the Week award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Former Mormon bishop highlighted in AP investigation arrested on felony child sex abuse charges

The AP used audio recordings, legal documents, email exchanges and interviews to reveal how a senior official in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped keep quiet the case of a former bishop in the church who was accused of sexually abusing his daughter.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Strong profiles highlight US Homeland Security secretary, Democrat seeking reelection in deep-red state

AP relied on deep beats expertise to deliver compelling portraits of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and South Carolina state Sen. Mike Fanning.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Investigation shows schools’ persistent use of ER trips to discipline kids with disabilities

AP investigated discipline disparities experienced by kids with disabilities and an increase in “emergency petitions” — when a school orders a child to go to the ER for a psychiatric evaluation.Read more

Best of the Week — First Winner

Data-driven reporting highlights outsized presence and influence of fossil fuels industry at climate negotiations

Members of the AP Climate team were struck by the large size and flashiness of stands dedicated to oil and gas at last year’s COP27. The AP team wanted to get beyond the anecdotes to truly measure the presence and influence of fossil fuels industries.

Climate data journalist Mary Katherine Wildeman developed a methodology to cross reference, identify and categorize more than 24,000 participants at the summit that focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate reporter Seth Borenstein, Climate news editor Dana Beltaji and their colleagues found nearly 400 people from fossil fuels industries attended the summit, not always in a transparent way.

The analysis led to other stories from AP’s Climate team, including water reporter Suman Naishadham and video journalist Victor Caivano’s package about Canada’s commitments to climate. In a separate story, Wildeman, Climate editor Doug Glass and Climate news director Peter Prengaman pored over documents to find that despite lots of talk, oil and gas companies are not moving toward a transition to green energy.

Climate video editor Teresa de Miguel and Climate photo editor Alyssa Goodman developed creative visual plans for all three stories to elevate the data and storytelling.

For work that resulted in three exclusive stories ahead of COP28, the team of Wildeman, Borenstein, Naishadham, Caivano, Beltaji, de Miguel and Glass win Best of the Week — First Winner.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Probe highlights dangers posed by aging tankers used to store oil

AP reported for a year on the 2022 fire of the Trinity Spirit, an aging oil tanker that exploded while anchored off the coast of Nigeria — the ship fit a pattern of old oil tankers put to work storing and extracting oil around the world even while on the brink of mechanical breakdowns.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Oregon launches legal psilocybin access amid high demand and hopes for improved mental health care

AP produced the first comprehensive, multiformat examination of Oregon’s legalization of psilocybin — “magic mushrooms” — that proponents hope will spark a revolution in mental health care, garnering national and international attention.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Ahead of Illinois’ first-in-the-nation change, AP highlights disproportionate effect of cash bail

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

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Justice Department acts after AP highlights inmate stuck on federal death row 

detailed how federal prison officials left a man on death row for years, even though a judge found him intellectually disabled and vacated his death sentence.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP highlights a rare bipartisan effort to restore felon voting rights

highlighted a rare area of bipartisan cooperation related to voting laws — the move to restore rights to former felons.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Nashville AP team lands scoop on lawmakers’ plan to reject federal school funding 

got wind of an audacious plan by the state’s Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton to reject federal education funding and quickly turned around a scoop that earned wide play.Read more.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Striking visuals highlight AP’s all-formats coverage as Sri Lankans storm government residences, offices

When police imposed a curfew in Sri Lanka’s capital a day before planned protests demanding the resignations of the country's president and prime minister, AP’s Colombo team knew to expect something big. But what followed on Saturday and subsequent days was unprecedented — a stunning show of public fury over the country’s dire economic crisis and months of political turmoil.

The AP photo and video team was well positioned when protesters stormed the colonial-era presidential palace. The extraordinary visuals, including photos by Eranga Jayawardena and Rafiq Maqbool, and video by Jay Palipane, showed demonstrators taking a dip in the presidential swimming pool and occupying the home of the most powerful man in the country.

AP correspondents Krishan Francis and Bharatha Mallawarachi filed quick alerts and updated the text story with fast-moving developments as the president and prime minister offered to resign.

For months of planning and legwork to chronicle their government’s dramatic fall, including once-in-a-lifetime visuals, AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner award goes to Francis, Mallawarachi, Jayawardena, Palipane and Maqbool.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Resolute AP crew in Chad, where not a single shot has been administered, highlights vaccine inequity

In Chad to cover the sudden death of the country’s longtime president, the AP team of West Africa Bureau Chief Krista Larson, Nigeria-based video journalist Lekan Oyekanmi and photographer Sunday Alamba decided to look at the COVID situation in a country that has yet to administer its first shot. Political unrest made the assignment far more challenging, with police on the hunt for journalists. Alamba and Oyekanmi had already been detained for eight hours and warned not to venture out into the street again.

After days of prodding, the team was granted just a brief interview with medical staff in a hospital conference room. But the all-formats crew pressed the case to see the COVID ward for themselves, eventually winning access. Accounts of bravery and deprivation among overwhelmed medical staff, and the images shot by Alamba and Oyekanmi, speak volumes, highlighting a deep global inequity despite promises by wealthy nations to help vaccinate the world.

For intrepid coverage in the harshest of reporting environments, Larson, Alamba and Oyekanmi win AP’s Best of the Week award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Sky-high reporting and smart use of all formats puts AP ahead amid Persian Gulf tensions

As tensions between Iran, its neighbors and the United States ratcheted up last week, AP’s staff in Baghdad, Dubai and Tehran turned out aggressive, yet cautious coverage, bringing facts and unique perspectives to the tense and escalating situation in the Persian Gulf, often well ahead of the competition.

Those stories included reports of “sabotaged” oil tankers off the coast of the UAE, and AP broke the news that Iran had quadrupled its uranium enrichment.

Meanwhile, AP’s Tehran team produced an all-formats piece on the mood of people on the city’s streets that could not be matched by competitors, and AP was first to report an FAA warning that Iran could misidentify commercial flights in the region.

AP was also aggressive on related developments, ensuring that clients had video and text coverage of tweets by President Donald Trump and Iranian officials.

For smart judgment, planning and effective use of AP’s resources to break news and bring facts to a region on edge, the team of Jon Gambrell, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Mehdi Fattahi, Bassem Mroue, Nasser Karimi and Vahid Salemi wins AP's Best of the Week, with the support of their colleagues and contributors in the region.

Best of the States

High-profile Georgia race focuses national attention on voter ID requirements

In the current political and media environment, it’s not often that a state politics story without President Donald Trump’s name in it drives a national political conversation for almost a week.

But that’s what happened when Atlanta-based newsperson Ben Nadler published a look at Georgia’s “exact match” voter registration verification process and other policies backed by Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, faces Democrat Stacey Abrams, vying to become the first black female governor of any state.

According to records obtained by Nadler from Kemps office through a public records request, 53,000 registrations – 70 percent of them from black applicants – were on hold with less than a month before the Nov. 6 election. Nadler also found that Kemp’s office has cancelled more than 1.4 million inactive voter registrations since 2012 – nearly 670,000 registrations in 2017 alone.

The story got tremendous play with AP customers over multiple news cycles and lit up social media.

For his deep look at a critical issue in Georgia’s high-stakes gubernatorial election and driving a national political discussion for days, Nadler wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

A surprising number of U.S.-Mexico border busts touted by Texas as ‘high threat’ are anything but

for using open records requests and data analysis to show that dubious “high threat” arrests are being used to help justify spending $1 billion to secure the Texas-Mexico border, even though some involve small crimes, first-time offenders or offenses that occurred far from the border. http://bit.ly/2ebDwYT

Best of the States

ONLY ON AP: FEMA sells trailers for pennies on the dollar despite high demand from disaster victims

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas in August, Emily Schmall in Fort Worth, Texas, and Michael Sisak in Philadelphia teamed up to report exclusively that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had sold off scores of trailers with little to no damage in the days leading up to the storm. Their reporting had an immediate impact: FEMA said it had halted the auctions and would evaluate whether any of the units could be used for Harvey victims.

Fast forward to November, when Sisak noticed the auctions had resumed. Working with Central Desk editor Jeff McMurray, Sisak and Schmall took a pointed look at government waste, showing how FEMA was selling gently used trailers for pennies on the dollar rather than making them available for disaster victims.

For resourceful reporting that broke new ground, Schmall and Sisak share this week’s Best of the States prize.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Trump photo from emotional meeting with shooting victims and families goes viral

The tears, grief and tension of President Donald Trump’s listening session with shooting victims and families after the Florida high school massacre were profound. Washington photographer Carolyn Kaster’s job was to capture the compelling event in images. That’s no easy task at the White House, where events are tightly managed and photographers’ movements are highly restricted.

But Kaster, working with photo editor Jon Elswick, overcame these obstacles and delivered an image of a hand-written note held by the president that quickly went viral and became one of the most talked-about stories of the day. The image wins Kaster and Elswick the Beat of the Week.

Best of the States

AP Exclusive: Confidential toxicology report details Prince overdose

In the nearly two years since Prince’s sudden drug overdose death in 2016, Minneapolis reporter Amy Forliti has closely tracked the criminal investigation into his death, cultivating sources who could help her break developments along the way, including the possibility of criminal charges.

A medical examiner's scant one-page report had cited an accidental overdose of fentanyl as the cause of Prince’s death, but provided almost no other detail. Forliti had pursued a copy of the autopsy and toxicology report ever since from multiple sources. She finally obtained the confidential toxicology report on March 26.

Forliti talked to three experts not involved in the case who analyzed blood and liver readings in the report and characterized them as “exceedingly high” – as one expert put it, they were very high even for a chronic pain patient. The details were something no other media could match.

Forliti's exclusive was widely played. It led the Minneapolis Star Tribune's website for hours and made the printed paper, a rarity for a story on which they compete with AP. CNN referenced the story on-air and online with credit to AP.

For relentlessly working her sources to break news on a long-simmering story, Amy Forliti wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

As women take to the streets, an in-depth look at domestic violence in France

Kamil Zihnioglu has seen lots of protests while working as a photo stringer for The Associated Press in Paris, but these campaigns were different, focused on a dark, unreconstructed side of an otherwise progressive France.

Every time a woman is killed by her partner, hundreds of activists take to the streets under cover of night to plaster signs decrying the deaths and pleading for government action. 

But Zihnioglu wanted to tell the story behind the protests. He spent weeks gaining the activists’ trust, and he teamed up with visiting video journalist Mstyslav Chernov to tell their story. Meanwhile, reporter Claire Parker and the Paris video team of Catherine Gaschka and Oleg Cetinic produced a powerful all-format package digging into deadly domestic violence in France.

For bringing attention to an issue that is often ignored, Kamil Zihnioglu, Claire Parker, Mystslav Chernov, Catherine Gaschka and Oleg Cetinic win AP’s Best of the Week.