for being first to report the findings of the state of Montana’s investigation into the deaths of 14 children, and how lawmakers missed a chance to fix the problem: http://bit.ly/2iVA9Zd
Hurricane Harvey killed more than 80 people and triggered historic flooding in Houston and across large swaths of Texas. But it also sparked oil spills and gasoline shortages. Those presented major tests for the state’s Railroad Commission, which, despite its peculiar name, actually regulates the energy industry – with historically lax enforcement.
So when the commission’s executive director, Kim Corley, abruptly resigned, the timing and circumstances made Austin newsman Paul Weber curious. He began making calls and soon secured a tip: Corley had been on vacation and unreachable at the height of the Category 4 hurricane that walloped the industry she was paid $180,000 annually to safeguard.
For his exclusive on a hyper-competitive story, Weber wins this week’s Best of the States award.
for working with newspapers and broadcast outlets in Washington state to file a lawsuit over access to legislative records. http://bit.ly/2fkqC0h
for using election records to show that Secretary of State Kris Kobach of Kansas presided over a 2016 vote that threw out three times as many ballots as any similarly sized state. Kobach now is co-chair of a Trump electoral commission that critics fear will make it harder for eligible voters to vote. http://bit.ly/2w3s37w
AP correspondent Tamara Lush first met renowned forensic anthropologist Dr. Erin Kimmerle while reporting on Florida’s Dozier School for Boys – a now-shuttered site where former students accused officials of abuse and dozens of students died. Kimmerle was investigating graves, and local media paid plenty of attention to the positive, bubbly woman with a high-pitched voice – unexpected from someone who jumps in graves and scrubs bones with a toothbrush.
Lush found Kimmerle and her work fascinating – in a state full of colorful characters, she calls the professor one of Florida’s most interesting and brilliant women.
So Lush stayed in touch, and when her sources at the University of South Florida – where Kimmerle teaches and has a lab – offered an exclusive opportunity to follow Kimmerle as she investigated cold cases through a new grant, she jumped at the chance. Lush's all-formats Only on AP package wins this week's Best of States award.
for accepting an inmate’s call and reporting his remarkable claim with essential context: The prisoner, charged with killing a transit guard, claimed to be a supporter of the Islamic State group, but AP’s story, with reporting also by Jim Anderson, noted investigators had found no evidence the terror group had anything to do with the killing. http://apne.ws/2m56r4e
for a profile of President Donald Trump’s choice for an important health care post that shed light on the nominee’s business arrangements and possible conflicts of interest while acting as an adviser to then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. http://apne.ws/2l9wuY2
for reporting exclusively that Illinois officials had eliminated funding for domestic violence programs and then failed to inform service providers for more than five months, forcing many organizations to abruptly cut staff and other resources. http://trib.in/2lQ9rkL
for reporting that, despite a ban on using assets seized in criminal investigations to raise salaries for law enforcement, the federal government told the Virginia state government how to get around the rule. The resulting worker pay raises of up to 30 percent became the subject of a heated floor speech in the state Senate and a disapproving editorial. https://yhoo.it/2jRl90P
for being first with the news that the Obama administration would ease sanctions on Sudan, a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terror. http://apne.ws/2iKZOC8
Many media were slow to respond to the historic flooding in Louisiana this month, but not The Associated Press. AP journalists provided timely, perceptive and poignant spot and enterprise stories from the very first hours of the torrential rains.
Aggressive cross-format coverage by a staff focused on stories of real people were key to covering the disaster. In text, the reporters included New Orleans administrative correspondent Rebecca Santana; Baton Rouge correspondent Melinda Deslatte; and newsmen Mike Kunzelman in Baton Rouge and Kevin McGill in New Orleans. Freelance photographer Max Becherer and video journalists John Mone of Houston, and Josh Replogle of Miami rounded out AP's team on the ground.
who reviewed six years’ worth of outgoing Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon’s promises and found Nixon overstated the number of new jobs created, and the amount of state financial incentives delivered: http://wapo.st/2iK7fgD
for being first to report that Pennsylvania's governor had decided to leave vacant thousands of unfilled state jobs to help the state cope with a large budget shortfall. http://bit.ly/2hN7mb9
for exposing that Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Evan Bayh did not stay once at his condominium during visits to Indianapolis during the whole of 2010, his last year in the Senate before giving up his seat, despite Bayh's stressing during his campaign that it has long been his primary home. http://apne.ws/2eAWt6V
The tragic stories pop up frequently in local media: a curious toddler gets hold of a gun and accidentally shoots himself or someone else. But how often does that happen? Under what circumstances? And what children are most at risk?
In a new investigative partnership, a team of reporters from the AP and USA TODAY Network spent six months seeking answers to those questions and others about accidental shootings involving minors. What they discovered is horrifying: A child dies every other day of an accidental shooting in the United States. What's more, the federal government significantly undercounts the problem.
The down-at-the-heels industrial city of East Chicago, Indiana, made headlines around the world in August after the mayor ordered 1,000 people to get out of a 40-year-old public-housing complex because of lead contamination.
Many residents and observers expressed surprise: How could such a problem go overlooked for so many decades?
The Chicago bureau’s Sara Burnett and Jason Keyser teamed up for several weeks of intensive document and street reporting. What they found was as disturbing as the original news: The hazard shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone – because the housing complex had been built on the former site of a lead-products factory.
When the World Conservation Congress came to Honolulu, Correspondent Caleb Jones did what any good AP reporter would. He sized up potential news and obtained releases early, including ones about the Great Elephant Census in Africa and a gorilla subspecies being classified as critically endangered.
But, while planning for an interview with Conservation International CEO Peter Seligman, Jones learned something that would take AP’s coverage to another level – and take him to the bottom of the sea – while other reporters sat through speeches and presentations. Scientists with the conservation group and the University of Hawaii were about to embark on the first-ever submarine exploration of two ancient undersea volcanoes 3,000 feet beneath the Pacific and 100 miles off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island.
The stories of heroin addicts overdosing in unusual places have become numbingly familiar: a McDonald’s play area, inside a children’s hospital, even while driving down the highway.
But it was another odd location -- the restroom of a library -- that drove Columbus reporter Kantele Franko to identify an additional, tragic twist to these stories. Franko learned over several weeks of reporting that the same qualities that make libraries ideal for studying and reading — unfettered public access, quiet corners and nooks, minimal interaction with other people — also make them appealing places to shoot heroin.
Who hasn’t glanced out the car window and seen another driver, head down, texting furiously? That was the genesis of a story by Boston-based reporter Denise Lavoie, who took an authoritative nationwide look at the texting-while-driving scourge and law enforcement’s losing battle to stop it.
Lavoie did spot checks with a handful of states around the country, as well as interviews with federal transportation officials and others. Her reporting – AP’s first major attempt to grasp the scope of the problem – found that police are fighting a losing battle despite adopting some pretty creative methods to catch serial texters in the act.
As nurse practitioners, Sister Margaret Held and Sister Paula Merrill played a pivotal role in the lives of many people in rural Holmes County, Mississippi, which with 44 percent of its residents living in poverty ranks as the seventh-poorest county in America, according to the Census Bureau.
So when the two Roman Catholic nuns were found stabbed to death in the home they shared, the news devastated friends and families, as well as the many people who came to rely on the pair for critical, life-saving medical care.
