reported exclusively on audio provided by a source of a secretly recorded meeting in 2020 of then-President Donald Trump’s Wisconsin campaign team members acknowledging his defeat in the state two days earlier, but also discussing how they planned to “fan the flame” of the lie that he won.Read more.
News outlets had widely reported a drop in U.S. college enrollment, but nobody had really explained why. Education reporter Collin Binkley and Ohio-based video journalist Patrick Orsagos figured the best way to find out was to talk with young adults themselves.
Binkley won a grant from the Education Writers Association and traveled with Orsagos to western Tennessee, where the pair conducted cross-format interviews with high school graduates whose stories exposed the reasons behind the trend: The high cost of higher education. Fear of student debt. A hot job market. General disillusionment with education after high school experiences disrupted by the pandemic and school closures.
The story sparked wide discussion about the cost of college, the need for reform in higher education and the relevance of a bachelor’s degree in today’s economy. The day after publication the story landed on Reddit’s “popular” page, thanks to a post on the “Futurology” subreddit that received more than 25,000 upvotes and 3,000 comments. It appeared on at least 21 newspaper front pages, with good play on The Tennessean, The Jackson Sun, The Columbus Dispatch, The Roanoke Times and the Ithaca Journal, among others.
The story was tweeted by several members of Congress, including Sen. Marco Rubio. Parents, professors and other readers reached out via email and social media, saying the story resonated with them and demonstrated the need for America’s colleges to offer something young people see value in. And the former admissions director at Jackson State Community College offered to advise one of the students in the story on her college options; that student said she plans to contact him.
For going to the source to find the reasons behind a major trend, Binkley and Orsagos share this week’s Best of the Week — First Place honors.
was out front and alone with news that President Joe Biden would boost deficit reduction in his long-awaited budget proposal by an extra $1 trillion, as all other major news organizations were reporting a much lower figure.Read more.
set AP up to not just document the first state to enact drag restrictions this year but to deliver a comprehensive look at the effects.Read more.
With no end in sight to Russia’s war in Ukraine, AP journalists were tasked with marking the one-year anniversary of the invasion while continuing to produce daily coverage. The result was an ambitious, wide-ranging package that both promoted and built upon the important work AP teams have done over the past year.
The process began months in advance, with AP reporters in Kyiv, Moscow and Tallinn devising a list of story ideas that would aim to show how profoundly lives have changed in Ukraine and Russia and the ripples beyond those borders. The journalists also looked at what could lie in store as we enter a second year of war.
Weeks of smart planning and coordination across bureaus and departments resulted in a strong, competitive package that included something for everyone. Erika Kinetz had an exclusive centered around secret recordings the AP obtained of intercepted conversations between Russian soldiers and their loved ones, which became AP’s most engaged story for the month. Additionally, the AP was also able to offer exclusively commissioned drone footage and, thanks to herculean efforts by staff in Ukraine, live coverage from various locations on the day of the anniversary.
For rich, thorough, revealing and thoughtful coverage of the anniversary, the Ukraine war anniversary team is this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
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.
published the first interview with renowned conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim since his severe neurological illness forced him to give up his full-time post at the Berlin State Opera.Read more.
were the multiformat team that unearthed a newsy gem: spirits supplier revenues for alcoholic spirits have surpassed beer in overall market share.Read more.
looked behind the news of a man who was killed by police after he fired an AR-15-style rifle in an Omaha Target store. Funk located the uncle of the shooter to explore his issues with mental health.Read more.
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.
teamed up in two locations along the U.S.-Mexico border leading up to the expected expiration of a Trump-era asylum ban as unusually large numbers of migrants gathered to enter the United States. When the Supreme Court temporarily kept Title 42 in place at the 11th hour, Dell’Orto had already published a story on the critical and demanding role that faith-based groups have played receiving hundreds of thousands of migrants in recent months. One team based in the El Paso, Texas, area; while a second focused on the crossing to San Diego. Both AP teams hired photo and video journalists to produce stories throughout the week that mixed fast-moving policy developments with empathetic accounts of what migrants were dealing with.Read more.
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.
collaborated to tell the story of two young adult Cuban sisters’ risky 4,200-mile journey to the United States and a new life.Read more.
relied on emails obtained through open records requests for an exclusive story documenting the competing priorities and tensions that sank negotiations between several western states for voluntary cuts in Colorado River water allotments.
Interviews with water officials cultivated for months -- or in Fonseca's case, years -- were key to supplementing and explaining what the emails showed. A separate public records request by Michael Phillis helped in building a timeline of the negotiations.Read more.
teamed up for a visually striking package looking at a program that might point the way forward for sustainable development of the Amazon. It involves a major French shoe company, Veja, and traditional rubber tapping.
Tappers working with a local cooperative provide rubber to Veja to use in their shoes. The arrangement is a solutions-based way forward to protect the forest.Read more.
The fatal stabbings of four college students at the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho, in November 2022 were initially shrouded in mystery and misinformation. As Boise, Idaho, Supervisory Correspondent Rebecca Boone worked to untangle all of this, a judge put up yet another barrier to getting the story to the public: a sweeping gag order prohibiting law enforcement agencies, attorneys or anyone else associated with the case from discussing it publicly.
In the middle of one of the biggest stories in the nation, Boone suddenly had a new task on her plate: singlehandedly spearheading a legal challenge to the gag order — ultimately recruiting a coalition of 22 print and TV media outlets, including The New York Times, to join the cause.
The AP couldn't have had a better advocate for the task. Boone has a track record of fighting for press access and has made the issue a top priority in her lengthy AP career.
in Anchorage spotted a small item on the website of a radio station that serves a remote part of Alaska that described how a Federal Emergency Management Agency contractor had badly botched the translation of brochures into Alaska Native languages.Read more.
carried out an exclusive AP interview with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, which broke news during heightened tensions.Read more.
spent months with victims' families and authorities to explain why decades after the problem of femicides was recognized by Mexico's leaders the killings of women continue at a frightening pace. They attended protest marches, court hearings and interviewed the prosecutor in charge of investigating such cases in Mexico state, the nation’s femicide leader.Read more.
worked with colleagues across the United States when a historic blizzard whipped up devastation in Buffalo, New York. They combined to get real, on-the-ground stories and visuals of survivors. Thompson was snowed in at her home, but she was able to help run the story and report the chilling number of deaths in a city so accustomed to monster snowfall.Read more.
