teamed up on reporting from both sides of the border as AP took readers through the harrowing journey of a group of childhood friends on a fun trip to Mexico that ended up in kidnapping and death.Read more.
The coronation of King Charles III posed huge logistical challenges for the AP to cover, especially for those stuck outside enduring hours of soaking rain. But collaboration among dozens of AP staff, led by reporter Danica Kirka, videojournalist Kwiyeon Ha, photographer Alastair Grant, photo editor Anne-Marie Belgrave, Special Events Editor Susie Blann and Senior Producer Maria Grazia Murru, resulted in two weeks of exemplary all-formats storytelling, topped by the spectacular crowning itself.
The results showed: explanatory and feature-driven journalism in the lead-up to the wall-to-wall coverage on the day and weekend. Kirka’s knowledge from years working the royal beat enabled AP to offer clients a variety of stories covering the king and queen's profiles, the Windsor family drama, the clouds over the Commonwealth, the future of the monarchy, the economy and much more.
The weather and limited access on May 6 threw up several challenges. The team overcame them all to participate in huge video and photo pool operations while providing unique AP unilateral coverage from the best camera positions.
For the story told deeply, colorfully and powerfully across all formats, Kirka, Ha, Grant, Belgrave, Blann and Murru, with dozens of others contributing, earn Best of the Week — First Winner.
in-depth reporting on the scandals that have rocked New Mexico State University since last year led him to an exclusive all-formats interview with the two basketball players who filed a lawsuit against the school.Read more.
planned extensively, assembled prep and then worked quickly when a jury handed down the verdict in the Proud Boys sedition trial. They beat competitors handily.Read more.
zeroed in on an ambitious approach that would thematically cut across several global beats and intersect with India’s immense geographical diversity.Read more.
Two years ago, Barcelona video journalist Renata Brito learned of a mysterious boat that had washed up in Tobago with dead men aboard. With that, she and colleague Felipe Dana, a photographer and video journalist, began a dogged quest to find out who the men were, what had happened to them, and what heartbreak and unresolved questions they had left behind. From Mauritania to France and Tobago, they found forensic evidence and built trust with a network of sources. By the end of their exhaustive journey, they knew who these men were and what led them to their deaths. They even confirmed one man’s identity with a DNA test.
Immersive storytelling’s Nat Castañeda worked with Brito and Dana to shape the project, including a 13-minute minidocumentary. Immersive developer Linda Gorman worked up a complex interactive, and an Audience Engagement team led by Sophia Eppolito spent weeks developing a social plan.
For compiling the compelling and tragic story of a group of doomed migrants who would otherwise have been forgotten, Brito, Dana, Gorman, Castañeda and Eppolito earn this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
explained how professors, students and their families at the small, liberal arts New College of Florida are having their lives shaken up after the school came under attack from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “woke.”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.
employed strategic planning and dogged source building to ensure that AP’s Paris team had unique top shots and close-up access to film and photograph mounting protest violence in France, and capture the scale of a movement increasingly angry at President Emmanuel Macron. Read more.
AP boasts about its global reach. An all-formats package reported from Iraq demonstrates how the deep expertise of its journalists also reaches back through history.
We have an amazing team that covers Iraq day in and day out. But we also have a hidden resource: people who were there when history happened and are with us today. When we see the opportunity, we can offer our readers and customers that context. That was the case with Jerome Delay and John Daniszewski, both of whom were there in 2003 at the beginning of it all. They went back to offer some context about what has changed.
Delay and Daniszewski were both among the few international journalists in Baghdad when the U.S. launched its “shock and awe” campaign. They joined with video journalist Lujain Jo, a native Iraqi, and video journalist Jerry Marmer, who was embedded with Marines who invaded by land 20 years ago, to deliver an authoritative and nuanced portrait of a country that’s been out of the spotlight since the defeat of the Islamic State group five years ago.
Instead of focusing solely on the war-torn image that many Iraqis say is outdated, the AP team’s package also focused on what’s ahead for Iraq. Beyond exclusive interviews with the Iraqi president and prime minister, they also conducted dozens of interviews with Iraqi youth. These gave a deeper and sometimes counterintuitive look at a generation interrupted by war and terrorism, whose voices are rarely heard outside their home country. Half of Iraq’s population of 40 million is too young to remember Saddam Hussein.
For their sensitive and forward-looking view of an invasion that hit Iraq 20 years in the past, bolstered by their own lived experiences of it, Delay, Daniszewski, Jo and Harmer are this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
teamed up to report exclusively on a pathbreaking campaign to vaccinate an endangered species of monkey in the wild – an unconventional approach that may prevent extinction, but also raises questions about how far to intervene to protect wildlife.Read more.
When COVID-19 hit, tearing through prisons and killing thousands, it severely disrupted or shut down the very programs prisoners desperately need to prepare them for eventual release. Trauma counseling, college courses, and job training in carpentry, masonry and barbering were slow to adjust to pandemic learning. Isolation and uncertainty replaced creative outlets and mental health therapies for months on end. National Writer Aaron Morrison and video journalist Noreen Nasir paired with Los Angeles photographer Jae C. Hong to explore the problem through a behind-the-scenes look at a California prison.
Visual access inside U.S. prisons is extremely rare; Morrison got the AP access using connections with sources. The team was particularly mindful of how to humanize the men beyond just their blue uniforms and tattoos, especially as they expressed themselves with such vulnerability through the intensive therapy work and programs.
For extraordinary work that allowed AP’s audience to see the impact of the COVID epidemic in prisons, Morrison, Nasir and Hong share Best of the Week — First Winner honors.
highlighted a rare area of bipartisan cooperation related to voting laws — the move to restore rights to former felons.Read more.
stood out amid intense competition in coverage of the conclusion of the Alex Murdaugh murder trial. Speed, planning and creativity contributed to the success.Read more.
quickly responded to the potential for a viral story in a sparse email that went out late on a Thursday afternoon, about a Native American group acquiring the rights to one of America’s most enduring advertisements. The 1970s anti-pollution ad shows a man in Native American attire shed a single tear after he canoed through a littered lake.Read more.
's story on the contentious ripple effects of India’s caste system among the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. was an all-formats effort, pegged to Seattle becoming the first city in the U.S. to ban caste-based discrimination.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.
were the multiformat team that unearthed a newsy gem: spirits supplier revenues for alcoholic spirits have surpassed beer in overall market share.Read more.
teamed up on a multiformat package highlighting an issue that is typically under covered at the national level: the effects of gerrymandering on local governments.Read more.
For innovation and connecting with new audiences, the AP Entertainment video team of West Coast Entertainment Video Editor Ryan Pearson, U.S. Entertainment Video Editor Brooke Lefferts, and video producers Gary Hamilton and Leslie Ambriz are the first winners of this week’s Best of the Week award. The team used its contacts at the Recording Academy to develop and successfully execute a hosted 2 ½-hour red carpet livestream from the Grammy Awards that drew in more than a half million viewers, outpacing rival streaming shows. The AP’s new social video team quickly cut and posted videos from the live feed on a variety of social sites, which garnered nearly 1 million views. The Grammys livestream took weeks of planning and technical assistance to pull off and showed that AP can produce a highly technical live event in the entertainment space, and that entertainers will seek out AP’s spot on a bustling carpet. The video recording of the livestream also will greatly improve the AP’s archive of early hip-hop artists who were not covered by AP in their heyday.
