When former President Donald Trump was indicted on felony charges Aug. 1 for working to overturn the 2020 election results in the run-up to the Jan. 6 violent riot at the U.S. Capitol, the AP team was ready.Read more
When reports emerged of a shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, AP quickly assessed that it was more than an ordinary shooting.Read more
AP reacted quickly to reports of a plane crash north of Moscow, both in Russia and around the world, to offer fast, accurate and solid reporting on the death of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. AP’s exclusive video, photos and analysis dominated websites, front pages and newscasts as AP stayed in front of the quickly evolving story.
Amid conflicting reports, AP sent an alert on the crash at 17:00 Greenwich Mean Time, then another one three hours later confirming that Prigozhin was on board the plane that crashed; other outlets including the BBC had initially alerted Prigozhin was killed and had to walk back the claim before official confirmation.
Moscow news director Harriet Morris, photographers Alexander Zemlianichenko, Dima Lovetsky and Pavel Golovkin, video journalists Tanya Titova, Kostya Manenkov, Olga Tregubova and Kirill Zarubin, assistant Anatoly Kozlov, and reporters Dasha Litvinova, Emma Burrows, Volodya Isachenkov, Jim Heintz and Lori Hinnant all made major contributions, aided by Top Stories Hub editors Sarah DiLorenzo, Brian Friedman and Chris Sundheim.
For quick, exclusive coverage of a highly competitive story that gave our customers exactly what they needed, the Moscow bureau staff earn Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP took the small moment of former President Trump’s mug shot and put it in the context of American history, pondering how single images can and have shaped America’s view of itself.Read more
AP charged a cross-formats team using digital forensics to make sense of the chaos during the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.Read more
AP’s sleuth work helped AP capture images of a North Korean international sports delegation, believed to be the first since the start of the COVID pandemic.Read more
AP showed how and why a major influx of Mauritanians is arriving in the United States.Read more
On the eve of the first world track championships since Bowie’s passing, AP sportswriters Eddie Pells and Pat Graham teamed up to report exclusively on the mental health struggles of Tori Bowie that led up to the star athlete’s death April 23 from complications during childbirth at the age of 32.
The two had covered Bowie, who won three medals at the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Games, for many years and had heard whispers of her difficulties. A few weeks after her death, the autopsy listed the cause as “complications in childbirth.”
While other outlets pursued the angle that Black women suffer disproportionately from pregnancy complications, Pells opted to explore another dimension of her story, her struggles with mental health.
He sought out people at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and within track and field, to find out how a world-famous champion, who was eight months into what would be considered an at-risk pregnancy, came to die alone at home without medical care or anyone to look after her.
For sensitively telling the story of a great athlete who became isolated from her peers and died tragically alone in part because of neglect of her mental health difficulties, Pells and Graham are Best of the Week — First Winner.
When a wildfire broke out in Maui and obliterated the centuries-old town of Lahaina, staff in AP’s Pacific Northwest sprang into action. Honolulu’s Audrey McAvoy was on the ground within hours, leveraging the AP’s unique Hawaii footprint for the first of many days of aggressive coverage that allowed AP to own the story from the beginning.
McAvoy was quickly joined by Portland, Oregon, reporter Claire Rush, who canceled her vacation; photographer Rick Bowmer and video journalists Ty O’Neil and Haven Daley. Jennifer Kelleher joined the reporting effort from Honolulu, where she anchored the story for days with help from Chris Weber in Los Angeles and worked longtime sources, including Gov. Josh Green, to keep AP ahead. Rush, O’Neil and Bowmer slept in an SUV for two days in the burn zone.
On Aug. 9, apnews.com received 7.6 million page views — a new record and a 32% increase over traffic the previous Wednesday, and the following day also broke previous records with 7.5 million page views.
The Live Updates fixture, artfully anchored by a changing cast of characters, was also a huge winner for AP and served as a “search tree” that led readers back to AP’s content again and again.
For extraordinary coverage of the devastating fire, accomplished despite huge logistical challenges, the AP Maui team earns Best of the Week — First Winner.
West Africa correspondent Sam Mednick was in Niamey — by chance to make use of a visa nearing expiration — when mutinous bodyguards launched a coup against their president. But her stellar, singlehanded all-formats coverage is due entirely to her extraordinary multimedia skills and perseverance.
Day after day, Mednick produced live video, photos of demonstrations, WhatsApp clips to colleagues and interviews on and off the record to show the importance of the coup in a country that has long been considered a bulwark of democracy against Islamic extremism and autocracy.
The result: A story that Mednick owned alone among international journalists.
For her tireless, astonishing multimedia coverage in a place where few of our competitors, if any, had a presence on the ground, we are honored to award Sam Mednick the Best of the Week — First Winner.
applied data work and old-fashioned reporting to reveal how officials allow successive waves of young children to be harmed by lead, by leaving lead pipes in the ground when they already have pipes dug up for water main work.Read more.
In more than 30 stories dating to early May, AP journalists covered all aspects of the trial of Robert Bowers for killing 11 people inside a Pittsburgh synagogue building in 2018.Read more
AP broke news about a major development in the escalating U.S.-Iran tensions: The Pentagon is considering putting armed Marines and sailors on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz to guard against Iranian harassment and seizures.Read more
Amid mystery about the whereabouts of several migrant boats missing enroute to Spain via ‘The Atlantic Route,’ AP travelled north to talk to people in fishing town Saint-Louis.Read more
In Kenya, police brutality has long been criticized. But the violence this month against demonstrators still shocked. AP delivered an all-formats documentation of it, along with attempts to hide it.
As Kenyans protested new taxes and the cost of living, freelance photographer Brian Inganga delivered widely shared images of several people shot by police in one of Nairobi’s most volatile neighborhoods.
As rumors circulated about the number of people shot dead, AP confirmed that police received orders not to report the deaths, not even to their oversight authority, which is illegal. East Africa correspondent Cara Anna combined that with data from a medical-legal watchdog group to show that police had killed more than 30 people.
East Africa writer Evelyne Musambi wrote about one of the victims, a young man who carted water. Kenya’s president, William Ruto, had relied on the support of just these kinds of working class “hustlers” to win office, but they took the brunt of the violence. Video journalist Josphat Kasire was instrumental in finding the victim’s family through patient efforts at the morgue.
For showing the scale of violence that the police wanted to keep under wraps, all while protecting each other’s backs amid street violence, Inganga, Anna, Musambi and Kasire are this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP photographers captured the hidden face of the Tour de France with an exclusive and unique photo gallery — on top of their gripping, treacherous work to cover 21 straight days of the world’s premier cycling race.Read more
AP took advantage of deep-source work to help score a scoop on an interpretation of a state supreme court decision that made it more difficult for convicted felons to restore their voting rights.Read more
blew away the competition on the prison stabbing of disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar.Read more.
get AP access to thousands of pages of documents that gave a glimpse of the federal government’s haphazard handling of nuclear waste in the St. Louis area.Read more.
produced fast, engaging and comprehensive coverage of the NATO summit in Vilnius.Read more.
