for following her instincts, using her sources and monitoring a government website to report that despite officials suggesting otherwise, federal land managers were moving to open up oil and gas leases near an historical park and sites Native Americans regard as sacred. https://bit.ly/2Sgd8V2
for making the AP the only international news organization to gain access – in all formats – to a historic hearing on a reserve in the Amazon where members of the Waimiri-Atroari tribe recounted the slaughter of numerous members, allegedly by the army, as Brazil’s dictatorship government in the 1970s pushed to build a road through the jungle.https://bit.ly/2u6spdmhttps://bit.ly/2TKlZih
What’s lost when a newspaper dies? And how do you tell the story of this slow disaster happening in front of everyone’s eyes and still make the world sit up and take notice?
For reporters Dave Bauder and David Lieb, the answer was by focusing on the residents of one small town as they explained the death of local journalism in an authentic, vivid and compelling way.
It’s a story that’s happened repeatedly across the country, with 1,400 cities or towns losing newspapers in the last 15 years. The aftermath of the loss of the Daily Guide in Waynesville, Missouri, was richly told by a multiformat team of text, video and photo journalists as the centerpiece story for “Fading Light,” the AP’s Sunshine Week package on the decline of local news.
New York-based media reporter Bauder and Lieb, a member of the state government team based in Missouri’s capitol, spent several days in Waynesville and its twin city, St. Robert, reporting the story. Denver video journalist Peter Banda and Kansas City photographer Orlin Wagner worked closely with them to shoot visuals, while Alina Hartounian, the multiformat coordinator for the U.S. beat teams, created social videos that drove readers to the story. Bauder also secured an interview with executives at the company that shuttered the Daily Guide.
The package received incredible attention and sparked discussion online. Bauder and Lieb’s text story has been viewed nearly 120,000 times with high engagement, it has landed on nearly 30 front pages, and has been cited in several influential media reports.
For masterful work shining a light on a problem that has left whole communities less informed, Bauder, Lieb, Banda, Wagner and Hartounian win AP’s Best of the Week award.
The passing reference in a draft statement on an unrelated topic would have been easy miss. But Billings, Montana, correspondent Matthew Brown instantly recognized its significance – the U.S. was planning to lift protections for gray wolves, an action that would reignite the emotional debate over the predators’ resurgence.
Brown was reporting on sage grouse when he came across the draft Interior Department press release. It mentioned remarks that Acting Secretary David Bernhardt planned to make the next day at a wildlife conference in Denver: Gray wolves had recovered across the Lower 48 states.
Brown recognized the implication of that one sentence, and teamed up with fellow environmental beat team writer John Flesher of Traverse City, Michigan, to begin a race against the clock. Brown and Flesher scrambled to break the news before Bernhardt took the stage the next morning at the closed-press wildlife conference. Finally a source confirmed: Protections for wolves were again in the agency’s crosshairs.
The APNewsAlert moved at 8:45 a.m., a full 15 minutes before Bernhardt was scheduled to speak. Other news outlets were forced to follow in AP’s wake, posting their own stories that relied on a statement put out by Interior.
For seizing on a stray reference and reporting it out into a significant APNewsBreak on wolves, Brown and Flesher win this week’s Best of the States.
for his reporting on James Stern, a black activist from California who took control of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the U.S. Kunzelman was first to report that Stern was seeking a pretrial judgment against the NSM, trying to undermine the group he now leads. Although Stern didn’t respond to an email or phone message from Kunzelman, after AP published his initial story Stern then agreed to be interviewed on camera by Los Angeles video journalist Krysta Fauria, whose video accompanied a follow-up story. Both stories had huge engagement for non-breaking news. The Washington Post and other media outlets scrambled to match the scoop.https://bit.ly/2ERcOnShttps://bit.ly/2TBW0tn
for an AP Exclusive revealing a particularly egregious case of sexual harassment in New York’s state government, complete with an interview with the accused in which the man asked incredulously, “I tell her to ‘shut her whore mouth’ and I’m the big villain?” Klepper also interviewed three women who say that supervisors did not act over the course of two years despite their claims that the man groped them and exposed himself. https://bit.ly/2ETadtX
for using exclusive interviews, court documents and government records to unravel the way a business incubator promoter – who claimed to be a one-time Google executive – scammed nearly $2 million from dozens of people in the community of Opelika, Alabama. https://bit.ly/2C5Yu9o
for their quick reaction and effective coordination by teams on two continents that allowed AP to score an exclusive on Venezuelan families who became the unintended victims of U.S. sanctions against companies tied to the embattled government of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. https://bit.ly/2EARlzw
for finding data from six automakers buried in a government website that allowed AP to earn a two-hour beat on a critical set of recalls involving 1.7 million Takata air bags. Krisher found the news after he acted on a tip. https://bit.ly/2TQGFlw
for staying on top of the lingering effects of the record-long federal government shutdown, revealing that agencies still had not given back pay to thousands of workers nearly two weeks after the shutdown took effect. https://bit.ly/2SPgmiA
for leading the way on coverage of Georgia’s historic gubernatorial election, examining the results and capturing the fight for votes after Nov. 6.https://bit.ly/2K0TkOFhttps://bit.ly/2qNgorj
for leading an AP review across 50 state capitols showing that even though women made historic gains in state legislatures in 2018, men still hold the vast majority of top leadership roles. https://bit.ly/2MIgafu
Over the past two years, the Trump administration has relentlessly moved to relax or repeal major environmental and safety rules for the fossil fuels industry to further its energy goals. Each change was reported by news outlets, including the AP. But Billings, Montana, correspondent and environment team member Matthew Brown decided to look more deeply into the highly touted savings to industry as well as the societal costs.
Brown painstakingly examined 11 major rules targeted by Trump’s administration, wading through many thousands of pages of government documents. Brown identified $11.6 billion in potential savings for companies that produce, use and transport fossil fuels, with billions more expected from a freeze of vehicle fuel efficiency standards that will hike fuel consumption.
But Brown also discovered that those savings will come at a steep cost, including more premature deaths and illnesses from air pollution, increased greenhouse gas emissions and additional derailments of trains carrying explosive fuels.
His Only on AP story ran on front pages of at least 16 newspapers and on numerous web sites. The Washington Post displayed both the main-bar the accompanying glance.
For in-depth reporting and comprehensive accounting of the administration’s actions on important environmental and safety issues, Brown wins this week’s Best of the States.
for an exclusive interview with Adam Crapser, who was deported to South Korea four decades after his adoption by an American couple. Crapser, forcibly separated from his wife, children and friends in America, described his landmark lawsuit against the Seoul government and a private adoption agency in a case that highlights the shaky legal status of possibly thousands of Korean adoptees. https://bit.ly/2FKtGP1
You know your scoop has touched a nerve when it gets tweeted by both Ann Coulter and Chelsea Clinton.
Such was the case with Colleen Long’s multiplatform APNewsBreak that the U.S. approved thousands of requests by men to have their child or adolescent brides admitted to the United States. The story not only pointed to problems in immigration law, but also lax state laws that make immigration by child brides possible.
The story started with a tip from Ron Nixon, AP’s new international investigations editor, who had been told by a source that data requested by the Senate Homeland Security Committee would be startling.
Nixon passed the information to Long, the Washington-based homeland security reporter, who persuaded committee staff to give her the story exclusively. She also went beyond the striking data to give readers a sense of how the issue affects women’s lives, speaking with women who had been married as children. A compelling video accompanied the piece.
On a busy news day, the story was one of AP’s most widely used, fronting many news websites and posted to Facebook by multiple news organizations. The video piece also had a strong showing, receiving thousands of YouTube streams and 27 customer downloads.
For revealing a little-known loophole in immigration policy that raises concerns over security and exploitation, and for connecting the data to women victimized by the policy, Colleen Long wins this week’s Best of the AP.
for their work showing that dozens of states are expected to consider legalizing sports betting this year. An AP analysis shows that they should not expect it to provide a windfall for their budgets. http://bit.ly/2Tq6JDE
John Flesher, correspondent, Traverse City, Mich., and Brady McCombs, correspondent, Salt Lake City, for their work discovering a nationwide flurry of stopgap efforts by nonprofit groups, state agencies and businesses to protect national parks from an onslaught of litter and other damage as the federal government shutdown left most open. https://bit.ly/2TJKUPz
Welcome to the first Best of the Week of 2019. Among a series of very strong end-of-the-year nominations, the judges have selected two winners from opposite sides of the world.
A sweeping AP investigation by California-based investigative reporters Garance “Poppy” Burke and Martha Mendoza found that the U.S. is once again institutionalizing thousands of migrant children in crowded shelters, despite warnings that the experience could lead to lifelong trauma. Their national story, complemented with a comprehensive data package by Washington-based data editor Meghan Hoyer and NY-based data journalist Larry Fenn, was the first to provide shelter-by-shelter detention statistics, numbers the government had been withholding all year.
Our other winner comes from an equally impactful AP investigation by Beijing-based video journalist Dake Kang, newsperson Yanan Wang and Mendoza, again, which showed that clothing made inside a Chinese internment camp housing Muslim Uighurs is being shipped to a U.S. company that supplies sportswear to American schools and universities.
To do this, they cross-referenced satellite imagery, Chinese state media reports and the address of a Chinese supplier on bills of lading destined for Badger Sportswear in North Carolina. Kang then travelled to Kazakhstan to get multiple on-camera accounts of forced labor in the Chinese camps.
For enterprising, important work, the team of Burke, Mendoza, Hoyer and Fenn, and the team of Kang, Wang and Mendoza share AP’s Best of the Week.
For several intense weeks, AP’s all-formats Paris team had been contending with the violent street protests of the yellow vest movement. But a new threat to France’s peace suddenly arose when a man opened fire near the well-known Christmas market in Strasbourg.
On the evening of Dec. 11, the gunman shot and fatally wounded five people and injured a dozen more at the market. French authorities soon identified the suspect and said that the attack was being investigated as an act of terrorism. With that, France and Benelux Bureau Chief Angela Charlton and her all-formats crew quickly pivoted from the street protesters to focus on the attack, just as a massive manhunt was getting under way.
After AP confirmed that that police in Strasbourg had shot and killed the suspect on Dec. 13, Charlton scoured online white pages for potential witnesses, reaching a neighbor who, amazingly, was able to share images from directly across the street.
The exclusive video and photos that they negotiated were the result of teamwork and lessons learned from covering past attacks in identifying sources and deploying AP forces. And the close-up images told the story: the shooter’s body is seen slumped in a doorway as police and forensic officers move in.
The content, which had not yet appeared anywhere, was heavily used by broadcast and online clients around the world, both as video and for screengrabs.
For their resourceful, determined efforts to obtain exclusive images on this breaking story, the team of Angela Charlton, Alex Turnbull, Chris Noelting, Mstyslav Chernov, Jeff Schaeffer and Masha Macpherson receives the AP’s Best of the Week award.
for their in-depth look at the Chinese deployment of more than a million agents living in Uighur households – a program the government portrays as an effort to promote ethnic unity, though the Uighurs regard it as another attempt to quash their faith. https://bit.ly/2PaVIUb