Best of the Week — First Winner

AP delivers powerful multiformat coverage of fast-moving Myanmar coup

Early in the morning of Feb. 1, AP’s Yangon bureau alerted colleagues in the Bangkok regional hub of rumors that lawmakers and other elected political leaders had been arrested. With communication lines down in the capital Naypyitaw, confusion gripped other parts of the country, but an alert went out to say there were reports of a coup underway. 

Photos, video footage and detailed descriptions of the situation on the ground in Myanmar quickly followed, and were crucial in fleshing out the text story being written in Bangkok. 

That initial work under difficult conditions set the stage for strong, competitive coverage of a challenging and rapidly evolving story that continues through today. And it is that outstanding work that AP honors with the Best of the Week award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP exclusive reveals ex-Green Beret’s failed Venezuelan coup plot

In a gripping exclusive that reads like the plot of a Hollywood film, Latin America correspondent Josh Goodman revealed the failed plot to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by a ragtag group of 300 volunteers led by a former U.S. Green Beret. The ill-conceived plan called for the group to invade Venezuela from Colombia and ignite a popular rebellion that would end in Maduro’s arrest.

The plot was uncovered and dismantled with barely a whisper, but a cryptic tip to the well-sourced Goodman planted the seed of the story. Over the next several months he reviewed documents and interviewed more than 30 Maduro opponents and aspiring freedom fighters with knowledge of the plot, piecing together the narrative with a strong assist from investigative researcher Randy Herschaft.

Goodman’s story broke and reaction was strong: International media struggled to catch up and authorities in the U.S. and Colombia launched investigations. Senate Democrats have sent a letter to the Trump administration demanding answers.

For his impressive scoop on the failed coup that has been dubbed “The Bay of Piglets,” Goodman and Herschaft win AP’s Best of the Week award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Documents expose state police cover-up attempt in Greene death

scored yet another exclusive in his groundbreaking coverage of the death of Black motorist Ronald Greene in the custody of Louisiana state troopers, obtaining internal documents showing police brass still trying to blame Greene’s death on a car crash, more than a year and a half after they were aware of body camera footage showing troopers brutalizing the unarmed man.The agency sought to reduce its liability in Greene’s 2019 death despite footage showing troopers stunning, punching and dragging the unarmed man — and one trooper’s startling admission that he bashed him in the head with a flashlight, a use of deadly force not previously reported.Mustian's deeply reported story — which had AP’s second-highest reader engagement for the week — showed in startling detail how everyone from top brass to troopers on the scene were involved in trying to cover up or downplay their roles in Greene’s death. https://aplink.news/s7j

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Access yields engaging story of US couple rescuing Afghans

used remarkable access to chronicle an Afghan family settling into heartland America thanks to the efforts of a dedicated couple.San Diego-based reporter Watson had previously reported on Afghans fleeing to the U.S. She used farmer Caroline Clarin as a resource; Clarin worked as an agricultural adviser in Afghanistan and now works to rescue her Afghan contacts threatened by the Taliban. Meanwhile, enterprise photographer Goldman was looking for a newly immigrated family to follow. He connected with Watson and enterprise video journalist Breed, the trio traveling to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where, thanks to the trust Watson had built with Clarin, they had exceptional access to Clarin, her wife and the Patans, an Afghan family the couple “adopted” after paying to fly them to the U.S.The team captured intimate details of both families’ daily lives in all formats: the family gatherings, the Patan kids’ school days and life on the farm. Clarin and her wife talked about their worries — the expenses they were accruing to rescue Afghans, but more so, their fears for those still left behind. The text story also looked at the bureaucratic hurdles of getting families out of Afghanistan, and Breed gathered sound for an audio story, written by digital storyteller Shotzbarger, voiced by Watson. Shotzbarger also brought all the elements together in a compelling presentation.The package, running on the eve of Thanksgiving, resonated with readers. It records one woman’s dedication to the daunting task of bringing Afghans to the U.S., and the loving relationship built between a farm couple and a traditional Afghan family in rural Minnesota.https://aplink.news/o5thttps://aplink.photos/ukrhttps://aplink.video/fj6https://aplink.news/58c

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Dedicated reporting in case against Hawaii’s law enforcement power couple

for years of beat work and shoe leather reporting on the city’s former police chief and his wife, a powerful city prosecutor. The couple now faces trial on corruption charges as prosecutors say they paid for their lavish lifestyle by lying, stealing and cheating their family and clients. Kelleher’s intimate knowledge of the case enabled her to set up the trial in a way no other media could match. https://bit.ly/2Wkq76E

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP breaks stunning story of child caught in custody battle between Afghan couple, US Marine

The story was nothing short of shocking: An Afghan baby, the only surviving member of her immediate family following an American attack on their home, was brought to the United States for medical treatment only to be taken from the Afghan couple who raised her as their own and — against the couple’s wishes — placed in the custody of a U.S. Marine attorney and his wife.

AP reporters Juliet Linderman, Martha Mendoza and Claire Galofaro broke the competitive story after poring through hundreds of pages of legal filings and documents, talking to Afghan officials and pushing relentlessly for interviews with everyone involved. Then the trio wove their reporting into a beautifully written, compelling narrative that reads like an international thriller. The piece prompted strong reader reaction, with many asking how they could hold the government agencies involved responsible.

For intensive, lightning-fast work to put AP first on this deeply reported, deeply moving story, Linderman, Galofaro and Mendoza earn AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner honors.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Cross-format reporting keeps AP ahead on coverage of Niger’s coup 

West Africa correspondent Sam Mednick was in Niamey — by chance to make use of a visa nearing expiration — when mutinous bodyguards launched a coup against their president. But her stellar, singlehanded all-formats coverage is due entirely to her extraordinary multimedia skills and perseverance.

Day after day, Mednick produced live video, photos of demonstrations, WhatsApp clips to colleagues and interviews on and off the record to show the importance of the coup in a country that has long been considered a bulwark of democracy against Islamic extremism and autocracy.

The result: A story that Mednick owned alone among international journalists.

For her tireless, astonishing multimedia coverage in a place where few of our competitors, if any, had a presence on the ground, we are honored to award Sam Mednick the Best of the Week — First Winner.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Emirates jet crashed as gear went up for 2nd landing attempt

for putting AP well ahead of competitors in reporting the findings of the first official report into last month's fiery crash landing of an Emirates airliner with 300 aboard. http://apne.ws/2cP8AP5

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Interracial couples still face bias, disapproval 50 years after Loving decision

for a multiformat package on the 50th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision by the Supreme Court that looked at life for today’s interracial couples. http://apne.ws/2reHxCh

Best of the Week — First Winner

Source development, persistence land AP scoop with clues to failed Venezuelan uprising

The plot was bold: Fuel a military uprising in Venezuela by shifting the loyalty of key leaders, putting them in opposition to President Nicolas Maduro. But the plan to help the U.S.-backed opposition leader backfired at the moment of truth, prompting an understandable reaction from press to find out what went wrong.

While most other media speculated, AP Andean News Director Joshua Goodman used dogged reporting and years of source development to break the untold story of how the Obama and Trump administrations missed golden opportunities to woo two generals that the White House said were central to the plan.

The story garnered major play among customers and APNews users, and even earned the attention of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a driver of U.S. policy on Venezuela, who praised Goodman on Twitter.

For unearthing pivotal clues around a shadowy turn of international events, Goodman wins AP’s Best of the Week.

Best of the States

Brown reveals thousands of safety defects on oil train lines in 44 states

As domestic production of oil has increased in recent years, Billings, Montana, Correspondent Matthew Brown closely followed derailments of trains carrying volatile crude. A train from North Dakota jumped the track, exploded and killed 47 people in Canada in 2013. In Brown’s own state, a derailment near the town of Culbertson spilled 27,000 gallons of oil in 2015. Last year, Brown reported that more than 800 potential safety violations were discovered on Union Pacific freight lines after a fiery June 2016 oil train derailment in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge.

But Brown wanted to know how widespread the problem really was. By pushing repeatedly for public records and working with a longtime source, Brown was able to exclusively report the results of a two-year federal inspection program for the nation’s oil trains – and he revealed that some safety defects uncovered where similar to ones blamed in derailments that triggered huge fires or oil spills in Oregon, Virginia, Montana and elsewhere. For his AP NewsBreak, Brown wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Inaugural images: Talent and tech combine in sweeping, instant photo coverage

Remember these images from the Inauguration: The new first couple dancing across a giant presidential seal at a ball? Faces in the crowd cheering or crying in the rain? The instant when Donald Trump took in the scene through an opening door before stepping onto the podium to become the 45th U.S. president?

Credit for those signature images, which appeared across the globe almost as they happened, goes to the skill and artistry of a hand-picked team of AP photographers and photo editors – and also to the cutting-edge, behind-the-scenes efforts of AP technicians working hand-in-hand with them to cover the intensely competitive event.

Their extraordinary work, a stream of 2,000 photos sent from daybreak until well after midnight, earns the Beat of the Week.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Too quiet on the set: Filming accidents often go untold

The 2012 film “The Avengers” cemented Marvel’s dominance at the box office, but the movie had a secret: A man had died bringing the blockbuster to the big screen. John Suttles died after falling from his truck while preparing to drive it to a set, but his name was not listed in the film's credits. Outside the production and Suttles’ family, the only clue to his death and its connection to the movie was an 84-page investigative file by the workplace safety agency, Cal/OSHA.

That clue was uncovered by AP Entertainment Writer Anthony McCartney, who began investigating set accidents in 2014. After diving into state and federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration records, he discovered that dozens of workers had been killed and more had been seriously hurt on big-name television and film properties. Set accidents remain largely hidden, and the consequences usually amount to mere thousands of dollars in fines paid out of multimillion-dollar budgets, he reported. McCartney also catalogued numerous fatal film-set accidents internationally. His painstaking work wins Beat of the Week.

Best of the Week — First Winner

An accidental shooting kills a child every other day

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.

Best of the States

Police losing battle to get drivers to put down their phones

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Police Losing Battle to Get Drivers to Put Down Their Phones

for the first major effort by AP to grasp the scope of the texting-while-driving scourge ...

http://abcn.ws/2cIGMin

Best of the Week — First Winner

4 Hours in Huntington: how the heroin epidemic choked a city

The scene, presented in the most vivid close-up, shows a paramedic frantically pushing an IV full of an opioid blocker into the vein of a woman turning blue and barely breathing. Then the radio squawks: Two more overdoses just reported. Where will Claire Galofaro’s riveting narrative go from here?

“The woman’s eyes blinked open” she writes next. Then: “Red lights on the phone at the 911 dispatch center flashed faster and faster until all 16 lines were screaming. They called from the dining room of a rickety house, the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, the bathroom of a gas station. `People are dying everywhere,’ one caller said.”

Best of the Week — First Winner

Private lives are exposed as WikiLeaks spills its secrets

When WikiLeaks announced the release of hundreds of Saudi diplomatic documents last year, AP’s Raphael Satter in Paris and Maggie Michael in Cairo provided some of the most aggressive coverage of the leak. They broke news about everything from the secretive kingdom’s checkbook diplomacy to unpaid limousine bills and cheating students.

But as they plowed through the documents, they also noticed medical and identity documents -- potentially serious privacy violations. Satter flagged the issue but never got a formal response from WikiLeaks; with other stories on the horizon and only a handful of questionable documents in hand, Satter and Michael shelved the subject.

Best of the Week — First Winner

Showcasing AP's college football poll

For 80 years, AP has organized the longest-running college football poll of its kind. Every week through each season, AP’s marquee listing tells who’s up, who’s down and most significantly, who’s No. 1. The 2016 preseason poll will start the buzz again when it comes out this Sunday.

But in this anniversary year, AP Sports wanted to do something extra: Produce a composite poll showing which 100 teams ranked highest over the full eight decades and 1,103 polls. The result – anchored by Ralph Russo, Paul Montella and Howie Rumberg – was an exclusive package that dramatically moved the needle on digital, social media and in print, while further boosting the profile of the AP Top 25 poll. It earns the Beat of the Week.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Judge: Reagan shooter can leave hospital

Ben Finley, Mid-Atlantic/Norfolk correspondent, Joe Mandak, reporter, Pittsburgh, and Ben Nuckols, Mid-Atlantic/Washington reporter, for their reporting after John Hinckley ...