was able to break the story of the arrest of "Dancing with Wolves" actor Nathan Chasing Horse, who is accused of sexually abusing young Indigenous girls over two decades.Read more.
AP’s persistence and months of source-building with the foreign ministry paid off to earn the scoop on the sailing of a U.S. ship laden with aid for Gaza.Read more
Longtime cultivation of a source paid off with the AP getting exclusive access to an important new study that provided insight into how the federal justice system handles terrorism cases.Read more
Strong source work and planning put AP in a position to dominate coverage of the United Auto Workers strike.Read more
developed a relationship with Pat Robertson’s spokesman over several years that set AP up for a speed win on the religious and political figure’s obit.Read more.
was the first to report on lawsuits filed against Texas by women who sought abortions because their babies would survive, or their health was endangered.Read more.
broke the news that the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts would resign after an inspector general’s investigation uncovered serious misconduct through extensive and intrepid source work, preparation and reporting.Read more.
Jake Bleiberg spent years reporting on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, including an investigation in September into the dropped cases. That story caught the attention of Irma Reyes, a South Texas mother, who reached out to Bleiberg to say that something similar was probably about to happen in the cases of two men charged with sex trafficking her daughter. Bleiberg checked sources and records and then headed to court, where he and Eric Gay witnessed Reyes’s worst fears come to pass.
The resulting story became the most engaged story of the week on APNews. It also received extensive play across Texas and national media outlets, and won praise from elected officials critical of Paxton, as well as from prosecutors, and even a lawyer for one of the men accused in the case.
For their compelling all-formats narrative story that put a human face on the dysfunction in Texas that led prosecutors to drop human trafficking and child sexual abuse cases, writer Jake Bleiberg, photographer Eric Gay and video journalist Lekan Oyekanmi are the first winners of this week’s Best of the Week award.
obtained an on-the-record interview and a big scoop on the first-ever federal regulation of toxic PFAS chemicals, commonly known as “forever chemicals.”Read more.
scored a significant scoop and offered the AP’s audience unprecedented insight into the Fulton County special grand jury that considered whether former President Donald Trump illegally meddled in Georgia’s 2020 election through sophisticated open records reporting and strong source cultivation.Read more.
dominated coverage of the prisoner swap involving the U.S. basketball star and Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death.”Read more.
used strong sourcing and teamwork to break the news that Justice Department officials in Washington had taken over the public corruption investigation into the Texas state attorney general and that the local prosecuting office that had led the probe for years had been recused.Read more.
reported on the killing of three 9-year-old pupils and three adults at a Presbyterian school in Nashville, the latest school shooting to traumatize the nation.Read more.
broke the news on June 21 that U.S. regulators had, for the first time, approved the sale of a new kind of meat made from animal cells.Read more.
AP didn’t just expose gaps in a federally mandated early childhood intervention program, we also explored the heartbreaking cost with an intimate, all-formats examination of the tangible impact on children with developmental delays.Read more
Even before Mitch McConnell began speaking in the well of the Senate on Feb. 28, everyone knew what the majority leader’s historic announcement would be. That was because AP had already delivered the news, beating all the competition.
Deputy Bureau Chief Mike Tackett had obtained McConnell’s remarks in advance, saying that he planned to step down in November to close his run as the longest-serving Senate leader. Tackett also worked out an agreement that AP could publish before McConnell made his announcement on the Senate floor.
Tackett, who is writing a biography on McConnell, worked closely with digital politics editor Katie Vogel and Washington text editor Tom Strong to make sure copy was edited and ready go. When the time came, Strong filed the urgent copy perfectly with the APNewsAlert and full story moving within the same minute.
The news sent a buzz through the Senate floor, and several journalists there asked Tackett how he did it.
Tackett’s source work also enabled Congress reporter Mary Clare Jalonick and chief congressional correspondent Lisa Mascaro to dive straight into the ‘what happens next’ portion of reporting instead of having to focus on the breaking news.
For delivering a package that kept AP ahead of amazed competitors through the day, Tackett, Vogel, Strong, Mascaro and Jalonick are this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
The video is, quite simply, bone-chilling. Taken from a rooftop, the footage shows Micah Johnson shooting a Dallas police officer at point-blank range.
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, reporter, Washington, D.C., for using cost figures obtained exclusively from Medicare actuaries to describe how the program’s safeguard for consumers with high drug costs had turned into a way for pharmaceutical companies to collect billions ...
for keeping AP ahead of developments in the fast-changing, highly-competitive Ryan Lochte story. Among the highlights were footage and photos of two of Lochte’s teammates being detained after they were removed from an airplane, and police officials expressing their doubts about Lochte’s account to the AP a day before calling it fabricated. Text: http://summergames.ap.org/article/2-lochte-teammat... Video: http://abcn.ws/2b0ZOua
As nurse practitioners, Sister Margaret Held and Sister Paula Merrill played a pivotal role in the lives of many people in rural Holmes County, Mississippi, which with 44 percent of its residents living in poverty ranks as the seventh-poorest county in America, according to the Census Bureau.
So when the two Roman Catholic nuns were found stabbed to death in the home they shared, the news devastated friends and families, as well as the many people who came to rely on the pair for critical, life-saving medical care.
