AP’s season-long efforts covering Iowa’s star Caitlin Clark and her pursuit of the all-time NCAA scoring record produced exclusive access and big all-formats wins.Read more
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in the middle of the night, AP staff from Bangkok to Baltimore contributed to all-formats reporting over a vast spectrum of spot and investigative angles.
It was just a bit after 3 a.m. when Baltimore reporter Lea Skene learned the Francis Scott Key Bridge had just crumpled into the river below.
Skene sprang into action and got a key fire department official on the phone. That allowed the AP to quickly give accurate details and avoid inflating the numbers of people missing, like other outlets did. Soon a team of AP reporters, photographers and video journalists joined to deliver coverage that earned huge play in newspapers around the world.
Annapolis reporter Brian Witte joined Skene on the ground and scored early-morning interviews with the governor and the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. Video journalists Nathan Ellgren and Rick Gentilo provided coverage that was the most downloaded among customers globally for the week, particularly their early shots. Photographers Mark Schiefelbein and Matt Rourke delivered images of the crumpled bridge and of locals discussing how the collapse challenged Baltimore’s identity as a port city.
For delivering an encompassing and engrossing look at how the collapse of a bridge scarred a city’s psyche and uncovered potential trade-offs when it comes to safety, Skene, Witte, Schiefelbein, Rourke, Ellgren, Gentilo and the Baltimore Bridge Collapse Team are this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.
A team of AP journalists in India and the United States provided an unprecedented cross-format look at the Indian shrimp industry, capturing labor and environmental abuses by the world’s top exporter of shrimp to America.Read more
West Africa Correspondent Sam Mednick obtained exclusive accounts from massacre survivors in the remote region of Zaongo in Burkina Faso.
Killings of civilians by security forces happen regularly in Burkina Faso yet are hardly reported amid a brutal war with jihadist rebels. Few survivors are brave enough to speak out and most flee, staying silent under a repressive regime. Government investigations are also rare, and no one is held accountable.
Mednick, who is based in Senegal, was looking into reports of one of many such violent incidents that she had seen video evidence of circulating in WhatsApp groups, when a source in Dakar said he had relatives who survived the massacre and could speak to her.
Through the trusted contact in Senegal, she was able to talk to a family that lived in the area and connect with survivors.
AP was the only media able to get the story and photos of this attack, one of several killings under investigation by the U.N. and government. To date, no one has been held accountable.
Washington-based newsperson Michael Biesecker was able to add reporting on Burkina’s military links to the U.S. and worked closely with Mednick from the start to develop the reporting.
For exposing a crime that was all but impossible to report on, Mednick and Biesecker’s story is Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP marked the 50th anniversary of Tommy John surgery on the baseball world with an all-formats package that looked at the past, present and future of the surgery and its impact on thousands of players and even teenagers who have gone through it, uncovering surprising details.Read more
In the runup to Super Tuesday, The Associated Press showed why it’s at the top of the class when it comes to elections coverage.
As Super Tuesday neared, the AP had an issue on its hands: how will it call races that night when it would have no VoteCast poll — but the TV networks had their exit polling, which could have put the AP at a competitive disadvantage? Serena Hawkins, data scientist for AP’s Decision Team, got to work.
In just two weeks, she researched, developed, tested and deployed a new approach to race calling that allowed the AP to declare Donald Trump and Joe Biden winners in several states with a very small return of counted votes.
That new model, used by the AP on Super Tuesday, put AP’s race calls ahead in states where the TV networks didn’t have a poll, and only a few minutes behind in states where they did — and with no errors in its calls.
Meanwhile, the AP, for the first time, was able to deliver its vote count directly to news consumers through a new immersive elections experience on APNews.
The effort was captained by development lead Linda Gorman, with team members Ryan Best, Michelle Minkoff Carlson, Chaithra Chandraiah, Shelly Cheng, Chad Day, Phil Holm, Dan Kempton, Humera Lodhi, Maya Sweedler, Pablo Barria Urenda and Robert Weston. On the night of Super Tuesday, the recirculation rate for these pages was, in a word, stratospheric.
For all these reasons, Serena Hawkins and the Elections Data Visualizations Team are Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP Sports writer Bernie Wilson leveraged his 33 years of sailing coverage to break the news that two-time Olympic medalist JJ Fetter wrote a letter calling for the resignations of U.S. Sailing’s CEO, president and any other board member who supports a federal lawsuit against a sailing foundation.Read more
AP turned what would’ve been a mundane story into a riveting tale of a family’s longing to have something — anything — to bury of their deceased loved one.Read more
AP told a captivating story and captured exclusive visuals that encompassed how Tahiti’s environment and way of life is threatened by the Olympic Games’ decision to host its surfing competition on the island.Read more
Kansas City’s AP staff was just wrapping up what was supposed to be a day of fun as the city was celebrating the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win with a parade and rally. They were regrouping in the office — and some had family nearby at the parade — when shots rang out.
Photographer Charlie Riedel and video journalist Nick Ingram rushed out the door, while correspondent Heather Hollingsworth tried to confirm what happened. After she alerted that shots had been fired — the first of many alerts on this story — she also raced outside, and days of exhaustive coverage began.
Riedel and stringers sent in photos showing the reality of the shooting’s aftermath — people on stretchers, bloodied and shocked. Ingram went live, interviewing people who were stunned by the violence and gathering background video, or b-roll. Hollingsworth sought out witnesses, while other AP staffers helped from afar, including Oklahoma City correspondent Sean Murphy, who jumped in to help stitch the story together as it was developing.
AP’s coverage was a collaboration across teams and formats for the next several days.
For leaping into a fast-breaking story, supported by colleagues around the United States, Ingram, Hollingsworth and Riedel earn Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP revealed how some Air Force nuclear missile officers were exposed to toxic risks that have likely been a factor in scores of cancers, despite the military saying for years that its nuclear missile capsules were safe.Read more
The expertise of AP’s team and detailed advanced planning allowed the AP to dominate coverage of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case to determine whether Donald Trump can remain on the ballot.Read more
From San Francisco to Kansas City, Tokyo to Las Vegas, the coverage of Super Bowl 58 required a comprehensive effort and coordination between Photos, Video, Digital, Audience, Sports, Entertainment, News and Business unlike any other previous championship game.Read more
AP relied on deep beats expertise to deliver compelling portraits of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and South Carolina state Sen. Mike Fanning.Read more
AP journalists combined to produce clear, multiformat explanatory coverage of the complicated electoral process in Nevada, and why it matters. Read more
Hail Mary? Hail Julio. As swarms of players and media surrounded Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce after the Kansas City Chiefs’ AFC championship win, photographer Julio Cortez captured the perfect shot: the couple kissing on the field, Swift’s hand pressed against Kelce’s cheek. It was an intimate moment amid chaos, one that only Cortez — AP’s chief photographer for Texas and Oklahoma, temporarily returned to Baltimore — got. Other outlets made photos of the couple embracing, but Cortez had the singular — and viral — angle.
Before Sunday’s game, the only photos of Swift’s football attendee era were made in tunnels or from afar as she watched in luxury suites. But Cortez knew that if the Chiefs punched their ticket to another Super Bowl, players’ friends and families would end up on the field. With AP’s Matt Slocum, Alex Brandon and Nick Wass in their assigned on-field positions, Cortez called an audible, walking around the stage to find Swift. A believer in being “pushy but professional,” Cortez “sweet-talked” bodyguards to get into unique position. Swift and Kelce’s reunion was, well, swift. As Kelce “gave her the fastest kiss,” Cortez jumped in front of the NFL Films camera, raising his own over a guard’s head. About a minute after the photo was made, photo editor Mike Stewart knew it was the shot of the game, affixing the golden APTOPIX stamp. It was immediately picked up by hundreds, rocketing around the world with usage by customers ranging from The New York Times, People to India’s Hindustan Times and Argentina’s La Voz.
For an image that’s assuredly a first-ballot Hall of Famer, Cortez is Best of the Week — First Winner.
Late last Monday evening, videos began circulating online of young Hasidic men emerging from a tunnel inside a historic Brooklyn synagogue and brawling with police. AP quickly pulled together a story on what little police and the synagogue’s leaders would say, but big questions still remained.Read more
Thanks to teamwork across multiple departments and formats, AP dominated coverage of a tragic school shooting in Perry, Iowa, by being the first with photos from the scene, the first to have interviews with students, and the only media outlet to secure an interview with the mother of the 11-year-old victim, as well as exclusive photos of him.Read more
AP uncovered how police failed to prevent DeAngelo Martin, a Detroit serial killer, from murdering four women and raping two others.Read more
More than six months after the explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine’s Kherson region, an AP investigation by Samya Kullab and Ilia Novikov found that Russian occupation authorities vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead. The AP inquiry came the closest yet to revealing the real number of deaths Russia tried to hide from the dam’s destruction, which Ukrainians believe was carried out to hamper the Ukrainian counteroffensive across the Dnipro River. Russia has denied it was responsible.
AP Kyiv correspondent Kullab and news assistant Novikov were working on a different story about how residents of the affected town of Oleshky were returning slowly to Ukraine. During their reporting, a source told them of a mass grave. That sent Kullab and Novikov in a fresh direction, and the story of the hidden deaths developed from there. Eventually, the AP spoke to health workers, volunteers, residents and recent escapees who provided invaluable details. Instead of the 59 people Russian authorities said drowned in the territory they control, AP found the real number is at least in the hundreds in just one town.
For dogged pursuit of the facts and allowing victims and their survivors to be heard, Kullab and Novikov earn Best of the Week — First Winner.
