for getting behind-the-scenes access to former Miami Hurricanes coach Butch Davis’ return to coaching at Florida International University after a seven-year hiatus. http://bit.ly/2xbt5Bx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP9Fs6EHlsY
for using documents obtained through a public records request to reveal the amount of taxpayer dollars the California Legislature paid in the past five years to settle harassment, racism and other claims. https://apnews.com/e8c7091f87394ce08bb3d5dd59c1eb6...
for their exclusive reporting showing that in Pope Francis’ home country Argentina, the number of clerics publicly identified as alleged sexual abusers has increased dramatically in the last two years. https://apnews.com/c62e2d5e692d4d33887a928a7d69839...
Georgia's centralized and aging election system has been the subject of several controversies – most recently in June, when a whistleblower revealed that state contractors had failed to secure an important election server. Hackers could potentially have affected the results of both 2016 races and a special congressional election last June that drew national attention.
The Houston bureau’s Frank Bajak wrote up the initial news of Georgia’s server problem. But that didn't answer the larger question of whether the vulnerable server had actually been hacked, so Bajak developed new sources and kept pressing for more information.
His efforts paid off when a source provided him with an email disclosing that the troubled server had been wiped clean of all data. Even more interesting, this destruction of evidence happened just a few days after a lawsuit was filed seeking a forensic examination of the server in an effort invalidate the state's vulnerable election technology.
For his enterprise and dogged pursuit of the story behind the story, Bajak wins this week’s Best of the States award.
for negotiating exclusive access to gun-training in upstate New York by an LGBTQ group that is taking up arms in response to its fears of organized extremists and white supremacists. http://bit.ly/2y84S09
for tracking down former hostage Joshua Boyle on a Canada-bound plane and getting the family’s first public statement. Benedyk gambled the family would be on the flight and had to overcome objections from State Department chaperones.http://bit.ly/2glIZinhttp://bit.ly/2xPk2Ca
Resolving cold cases can be thankless work for law enforcement – and an endless emotional journey for the families affected. Tamara Lush used the lens of one Florida cold case, and the relatives of a long-missing woman, to give life to the backlog of such cases nationwide.
After the publication of her first big takeout on an exhumation in a cold case, Lush turned her attention to two sisters who played just a small role in that piece. Lush met with the family numerous times – she was with them every step of the way through the drawn-out process of DNA tests, results, periods of silence from police, the day they finally got some answers about their missing family member, and the moment they shared that news with the woman's mother. The narrative story, teeming with emotion and details, can't be matched by any competitor.
For her Only on AP story that gave a face to the national backlog of cold cases, Lush wins this week’s Best of the States award.
for gaining access to a confidential European Aviation Safety Agency report detailing the extent of risks to passenger planes posed by competing air traffic controls on the ethnically divided island of Cyprus.http://abcn.ws/2g182XZ
for turning exclusive access to the right-wing neo-fascist group Casapound into compelling text and video that explained why the group is gaining political ground in Italy. http://bit.ly/2xXGWJc
Hurricane Harvey inundated homes, flooded freeways and swamped entire neighborhoods. Florida-based reporter Jason Dearen, who was deployed to Houston to help cover the disaster, knew there might be something else submerged beneath the turbid floodwaters. Superfund sites, some of the nation’s most contaminated places, are scattered along the low-lying Gulf coastline, including in the Houston area.
Dearen had been trying to obtain a copy of a federal study about the risks of flooding at those sites from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but had been stonewalled for two weeks. Harvey’s destruction provided new urgency to his request. For help, he reached out to Washington investigative reporter Michael Biesecker, a fellow member of the AP’s environmental beat team.
Through creative reporting that relied on data, collaboration and Dearen’s newfound skills as a boat man, they became the first journalists to report on the extent of flooding at contaminated waste sites in and around Houston. The on-site observations by Dearen and freelance 360-video producer Claudia Prat raised concerns that some of the decades-old toxic stew left over from the oil, gas and chemical industries may have mixed with floodwaters. They also were on the ground – and on the water – before the EPA’s own inspectors. For their efforts, Dearen, Biesecker and Prat win Beat of the Week.
One of the most vulnerable senators up for re-election in 2018 – Democrat Joe Donnelly of Indiana - has staked his nearly two-decade political career on opposition to outsourcing and free-trade agreements that ship American jobs abroad.
Following up on a tip from Washington, D.C., colleague Erica Werner, Indiana Statehouse reporter Brian Slodysko pulled together public documents and customs records to reveal that Donnelly has benefited financially from the very free trade policies he has decried since his first run for Congress. As Slodysko reported in his “Only on AP” story, Donnelly earned thousands of dollars in 2016 alone from stock in the arts and crafts business his family has owned for generations, which ships raw materials to its Mexican factory that produces ink pads and other supplies.
For shining light on something a politician would have preferred left unknown to his constituents, Slodysko wins this week’s Best of the States award.
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
It’s a difficult thing, interviewing people about their desolation. But an Associated Press team went to Grays Harbor County, Washington, and came away with a deeply reported portrait of a place that had voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1932, but placed a bet on Donald Trump in November as its rescuer from addiction and economic malaise.
Sensitively and penetratingly, the team of Claire Galofaro, David Goldman and Martha Irvine used text, photos and video to tell the tale of an old logging county that “answered Donald Trump's call to the country's forgotten corners.” A half-year into the Republican’s term, they found varying degrees of faith in his ability to make a difference in their lives.
The latest installment in the AP’s Trump Country series is the Beat of the Week.
It’s well-known that many U.S. factory jobs have been shipped overseas or automated out of existence. What’s not so well-known is that American manufacturing is no longer shrinking. Factories have actually added nearly a million jobs in the past seven years.
But the jobs have changed: The new ones generally require advanced education, technological know-how or specialized skills to survive in what are now highly automated workplaces. Yet training opportunities are limited, particularly for older workers.
Cincinnati correspondent Dan Sewell and photographer John Minchillo pinpointed this uneasy mix in southwestern Ohio and proposed an immersive multimedia story to illuminate the trend for readers and viewers. Collaborating with Washington business writer Chris Rugaber, video-first reporter Mike Householder and others, they produced a multifaceted package that made full use of the AP’s global reach, earning this week’s Best of the States prize.
Sarah Rankin and Steve Helber were covering a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia when chaos broke out. The marchers and counter protesters – Rankin’s words – ‘’threw punches, screamed, set off smoke bombs. They hurled water bottles, balloons of paint, containers full of urine. They unleashed chemical sprays. Some waved Confederate flags. Others burned them.’’
Rankin and Helber were the first of many AP colleagues to cover the story, and their initial work paid off in significant ways.
For weeks, the escalating back-and-forth between North Korea and the United States over possible nuclear conflict had made for headlines that were alarming at the least _ and to many, terrifying.
Amid all the bluster came an exclusive report from Matthew Pennington, foreign policy reporter in Washington, revealing that senior U.S. and North Korean diplomats have been maintaining a back-channel communication for the last several months, and that they'd moved on from an early focus on U.S. detainees to address the broader strains in the relationship.
At a time of heightened alert, the story pointed to a possible diplomatic path out of the crisis, and indicated that both U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be more flexible on the idea of negotiations than they are letting on. After days of bombastic threats from both sides, Pennington's reporting, which wins the Beat of the Week, provided a sobering reality check: the enemies aren't on an unavoidable path toward conflict.
After the U.S. Supreme Court told states that juveniles who had been given mandatory life without parole sentences should get the chance to argue for their release, national writers Sharon Cohen and Adam Geller wanted to know how judges, prosecutors, lawmakers and parole boards were dealing with the inmates.
Aided by reporters in all 50 states, their exhaustive investigation showed for the first time that the high court’s mandate in 2016 to give inmates a chance at freedom is being applied inconsistently, varying from state to state, even county to county, “in a pattern that can make justice seem arbitrary.”
The resulting three-day series featured deeply reported text stories, an expansive photo report of inmates from across the country, a 16-minute audio extra, a video animation on teen brain development, a video story, and a searchable trove of state-by-state details – all hosted in a dynamic hub on APNews.com.
Cohen and Geller’s work wins this week’s Beat of the Week prize.
for illustrating the largely underreported problem of discarded needles from the opioid crisis turning up in rivers, on beaches and in public parks across the country. http://bit.ly/2v5VKqX
Sometimes a story doesn’t come from a reporter’s beat or region, just from natural journalistic curiosity.
Atlanta’s Jeff Martin was intrigued after investigators blamed the deadly tower fire in London in part on the flammable cladding that wrapped around its exterior. Wondering what buildings in the U.S. might be using the cladding, he went to the manufacturer’s website and found a trove of information in a promotional brochure.
The brochure said the cladding was used on a terminal at the Dallas airport, the Cleveland Browns stadium, an Alaska High School and a high-rise hotel in Baltimore. Martin, Gainesville, Florida, reporter Jason Dearen, and Baltimore reporter Juliet Linderman helped coordinate a cross-country, multi-media reporting effort that wins this week’s Best of the States.
for a story on law enforcement’s use of a practice known as “Facebook shaming,” where suspects who haven’t yet been charged, tried or convicted are publicly ridiculed on social media platforms. http://abcn.ws/2u6DA6n