for teaming on a story that showed a 99-year-old driver who drove his recreational vehicle the wrong way on a Florida highway, killing two, had had his driver’s license renewed in Michigan only weeks before. http://wapo.st/2F5sYc0
for gaining unprecedented access to a meeting at Washington state’s troubled Western State Hospital where staff expressed safety concerns as nurses and others are assaulted by patients and inmates with severe mental issues. https://bit.ly/2CqIOjE
for uncovering a series of deals made by U.S. allies in Yemen with al-Qaida and revealing how closely they fight together against the rebels. https://bit.ly/2MpnKL5
for revealing that first lady Melania Trump’s parents became U.S. citizens using a path that their son-in-law has suggested eliminating. https://bit.ly/2AZkSDv
for their AP investigation that found that a company owned by a big U.S. political donor had profited by guiding dubious businesses to circumvent anti-money-laundering protections.https://bit.ly/2KEBEaxhttps://bit.ly/2AX87cp
San Francisco-based freelance photographer Noah Berger is one of the foremost wildfire photographers in California.
His experience helped put him in the right place to shoot stunning images as the Carr Fire swept into Redding and threatened to devour much of the Northern California city of 92,000. It also made AP the first major news outlet to have boots on the ground in the city, a competitive advantage that produced details other didn’t have, and enabled managers to quickly get Sacramento reporter Jonathan J. Cooper headed to the scene.
Berger described the Carr Fire as one of the most intense fire fights he has ever witnessed. His dramatic images put the AP ahead of key competitors by more than a day.
Cooper's reporting included a key measurement of a wildfire’s destructive force: the number of homes lost. When authorities kept saying 65 structures had been destroyed, Cooper went back to two neighborhoods he had visited and counted all the homes burned to the ground. He found 60 in one and 66 in the other. AP’s figure, and the context that the number would ultimately be much higher, quickly became the headline on the story.
A wildfire is among the toughest assignments for any photographer but Berger gave the AP a significant competitive advantage. Cooper’s savvy gave AP a figure others didn’t have. For their work, they share this week’s Best of the States award.
for exclusive access and coverage of the family of a 1-year-old boy, who became the face of U.S. immigration policy to separate families, reuniting with the child in a remote area of Honduras. https://bit.ly/2uRhNzH
When a California judge chose the most lenient sentence for a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on campus, the outrage made national headlines for weeks. Anger at the judge turned into a recall effort on the June 5 primary ballot and more widespread media coverage.
Despite the glare, Judge Aaron Persky has been mostly silent for nearly two years. San Francisco reporter Paul Elias has spent nearly that entire time asking for an interview, over and over.
Those efforts paid off with an exclusive, three-hour all formats interview at the judge’s home. The judge said he had no regrets, even though the sentence may cost him his judgeship. The resulting story was featured prominently in local and national media.
For his persistence in getting AP a fascinating interview on a competitive story, Elias wins this week's Best of the States award.
for breaking the news that a lawyer is trying again to get citizenship status for residents of American Samoa, whose residents have a different status than those in other U.S. territories. https://bit.ly/2ElMa3n
for finding the families of Russian mercenary fighters killed in fighting in Syria, putting a human face on the cost of Putin’s secret war. http://bit.ly/2CBFVYd
for breaking news that appeals by two contractors had delayed until November construction of prototypes for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. http://cnb.cx/2wexLDb http://bit.ly/2v62lyM
Allegations that a lawmaker had been trysting with a prostitute while the Utah Legislature was in session rocked the state’s politics. The former lawmaker who had previously pushed for stricter laws cracking down on prostitution went into hiding. His attorney refused comment. The House speaker washed his hands of the scandal, and the prostitute was no longer talking, having sold the story to the tabloid site dailymail.com.
Political reporter Michelle Price needed another way into the story, so she started asking questions around the capitol.
She made a key discovery while looking at the screen grabs of the texts in the tabloid story: The dates lined up with the legislative session. She knew the lawmaker from southern Utah didn’t commute to the Legislature and would be staying in hotels while in Salt Lake City.
She started asking tougher questions. Was taxpayer money used to reimburse the lawmaker for hotel rooms where he met the prostitute? Now she had the attention of officials in state government.
Finally came the APNewsBreak: Price exclusively reported that the lawmaker used taxpayer money to book at least two hotel rooms he is accused of using to meet with the prostitute.
For determination and a commitment to exploring all angles even when the main characters weren’t talking, Price wins this week’s Best of the States.
In the days after the Las Vegas shooting that killed 58 people, authorities said gunman Stephen Paddock acted alone. But search warrants showed that police and the FBI were looking at two "persons of interest."
One was Paddock's girlfriend, whom police had cleared, and the other was a man named Douglas Haig of Arizona.
Haig talked to various media, including the AP, and held a news conference characterizing his sale of tracer ammunition to Paddock as a lawful transaction.
But Phoenix newsman Jacques Billeaud wasn’t convinced. He called a source he has cultivated in law enforcement who was willing to help but didn’t know the answer to Billeaud’s questions. Then, a few days later, the official called to say that Haig indeed had been charged with a crime. Billeaud quickly checked an electronic court records system and found that armor-piercing ammunition with Haig's fingerprints had been found in Paddock's hotel room. Haig was charged with illegally manufacturing and selling the ammunition.
Billeaud's relationship with his source put the AP ahead, and customers used the AP as first word on a competitive story. For sticking with the story and using long-term source work to break news, Billeaud will receive this week’s Best of the States prize.
Associated Press reporter Elliot Spagat has spent years covering the U.S.-Mexico border, building sources within the federal agencies that enforce the nation’s immigration laws and earning the respect of senior officials.
That source work paid off when Spagat scored an exclusive ride-along as federal agents executed what officials called the largest immigration action against an employer under Donald Trump’s presidency: An early-morning sweep of nearly 100 7-Eleven stories that targeted the stores’ owners, rather than the workers.
One U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said the operation was “a harbinger of what’s to come” for employers.
For his efforts to put AP ahead of the competition (some news organizations cited AP while their own reporters rushed to confirm the story), Spagat wins this week’s Beat of the Week prize.
for reporting on an ethnic minority Uighar student believed to have died in an indoctrination camp. They were detained for 11 hours by police in western China but resisted demands to turn over photos they had taken. http://bit.ly/2CyzvtP
Late in the evening on Dec. 4, West Region photo editor Stephanie Mullen was monitoring a fire that broke out in Ventura County, about 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Mullen knew that if the notorious Santa Ana winds really picked up the flames could start burning homes.
She hired Northern California freelance photographer Noah Berger, an expert at shooting wildfires, and partnered him with Los Angeles-based staff photographer Jae Hong. Berger and Hong were in place as daylight broke and the fire surged into the city of Ventura, where it burned hundreds of homes. They rapidly shot and filed, allowing AP to deliver striking imagery before our competitors had even started their day.
The AP owned the coverage in those important early hours with impressive play globally.
Later that morning, Orange County-based photographer Chris Carlson worked his way through road closures to make images of horses being rescued and flames overwhelming homes in Los Angeles County. And as the week wore on, photographer Greg Bull snaked his way through roadblocks and heavy traffic to capture nighttime images of fires in San Diego County, then slept in his car and got haunting daybreak photos of the destruction.
For providing a photo package no competitor could rival, Hong, Carlson, Bull and Berger share this week’s Best of the States prize.
Brian Madeux made medical history on Nov. 13 when he became the first person to have his genes edited inside his body in an attempt to cure a genetic disease. And the Associated Press was the only news organization to document this experiment, which could advance medicine by giving a potentially safer, more precise and permanent way to do gene therapy.
Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione got word earlier this year that the gene editing work would soon begin. She negotiated exclusive rights to the story, giving AP sole access to the patient, doctors and scientists involved. She spent six months reporting the story, teaming with journalists in three cities through several false starts and twists and turns to deliver an all-formats package.
For their enterprising work on a groundbreaking story, the team of Marchione, Kathy Young, Terry Chea, Eric Risberg and Marshall Ritzel wins Beat of the Week.
for an exclusive AP analysis of deleted tweets that revealed that disguised Russian agents worked to deflect scandalous news about Donald Trump while refocusing online criticism toward Hillary Clinton during last year’s U.S. presidential campaign.http://bit.ly/2zJMDhKhttp://bit.ly/2zJAGbChttp://bit.ly/2hx1ssO
It was just one of the many mysteries surrounding the Las Vegas concert shooting: How did the gunman, perched up on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort, fire off as many as 90 rounds onto thousands of concert-goers in just 10 seconds, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds?
Reporters Sadie Gurman and Mike Balsamo found the answer. Through sourcework, they learned that Stephen Paddock was able to carry out his assault in moments because he had used two “bump stocks,” devices that allow a semi-automatic rifle to repeatedly fire like a machine gun.
The scoop was part of an impressive week of coverage by staff in the Las Vegas bureau and across the AP that also included photographer John Locher’s dramatic images of police screaming for people to take cover as the gunman sprayed the crowd with bullets.
For their work in bringing critical details and images of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Gurman, Balsamo and Locher win this week’s Beat of the Week prize.
for using public records to discover that U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's dormant congressional campaign committee sold a used RV to a Montana lawmaker who wants an Interior Department job. http://bit.ly/2xpG3Zo