Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

All-formats team connects people whose lives depend on the Amazon forest with larger climate goals

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

First interview with musician Daniel Barenboim since announcing illness

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Shooting at Nebraska Target store highlights gun law gaps

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.

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Trump campaign staff on 2020 election lies: ‘fan the flame’

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP ahead on news of an actor’s arrest based on tip from source and stakeout

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Escape from Cuba and an odyssey to a new life in the US

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Cross-format collaboration produces in-depth coverage of L.A. area massacre

's coverage of Los Angeles County's worst massacre led to an array of stories and visuals that portrayed not only the human suffering and complex cultural significance of the community where the attack occurred, but also held police accountable for their hours-long delay in alerting the public that a mass killer was on the loose.

Bernard Condon, Jim Mustian and Julie Watson reconstructed a detailed timeline of the shooting to confidently report that it took five hours after the shooting for authorities to alert the public that the gunman was on the loose. The story was widely played and was followed by the Los Angeles Times, which played catch-up on its own turf. AP was one of only several outlets to obtain video surveillance footage showing a hero wresting the weapon from the shooter and was among the first news outlets to report details on all 11 victims.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP Exclusive: Emails reveal tensions in Colorado River talks

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Confidential document reveals key human role in gunshot-detection technology

broke the news that gunshot-detection company ShotSpotter gives its human reviewers broad discretion to overrule an artificial intelligence-powered law enforcement tool’s determination about whether something is a gunshot. The exclusive came after Burke, an investigative reporter in San Francisco, obtained a confidential ShotSpotter document. The document provided a unique window into the company whose data is sent to police and used in criminal cases nationwide.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Persistence pays off in delivering AP scoop on DOJ probe

immediately reached out to state and county officials in Georgia to find out if they had also received subpoenas and was told they had not. She filed open records requests with state and local governments and was told there were no records to provide. But she stayed on it. The extra effort paid off. Nearly a week into her reporting, a source called to say that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger got a subpoena that day. Brumback immediately prepared a story while her source sent her the actual subpoena. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution credited the AP in describing the effort to compel Raffensberger’s cooperation.

Read more.

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP's Boone spearheads 20-outlet legal challenge to Idaho college stabbings gag order

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. 

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

FEMA mistranslations latest chapter in suppression of Indigenous languages

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP Seoul bureau secures news-making interview with South Korean president

carried out an exclusive AP interview with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, which broke news during heightened tensions.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Brazilian capital's chaotic uprising

sprang into action on Jan. 8 when violence erupted in Brazil’s capital. Supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rampaged through the presidential palace, Supreme Court and Congress.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Mexico team explains country's struggle against femicide

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP staffers tell story of historic blizzard through the eyes of real people

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP provides deep coverage of preparations to end Trump-era asylum ban

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP's Winfield holds Pope Francis’ Jesuit order to account by challenging superior to tell truth

held Pope Francis’ Jesuit order to account by challenging the superior general to come clean with the truth about a famous Jesuit artist accused of sexual and spiritual abuse of women under his care. The superior’s admission to Winfield – during a Christmas reception-turned-press conference – made headlines, and Winfield and AP were credited widely with having forced the Jesuits to answer uncomfortable questions and essentially admit they had lied. Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Census and race and ethnicity journalists tell multiformat story of Asian growth in Texas

used multiple formats to tell the story of Asian population growth in North Texas and how it's bringing change to the state. Spotting an Asian population growth trend in North Texas while covering the census beat, Schneider teamed up with Tang to get a fuller picture. The duo found a lot of the growth came from South Asians. Tang traveled to Texas, developing a story that put Texas’ growth into the context of overall Asian growth in the U.S. They also showed it’s not all Texas sunshine and smooth sailing for those trying to live their American dream. Some struggles, including racism and balancing being American and South Asian, can come with it.Read more.