Best of the States

The Future of Work: US adding factory jobs, but there's a catch

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.

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP reveals how dirty US fuel byproduct contributes to India’s dangerously polluted air

Oil extracted from the tar sands of Canada has contributed to booming production among American refineries, but it also has created a messy legacy: Ton upon ton of a filthy byproduct called petroleum coke. U.S. utilities don’t want it because of its extremely high sulfur content, leaving refineries with one option – getting rid of it – because stockpiling had stirred community outcries. Tammy Webber, a Chicago-based reporter with the environmental beat team, wondered: If refineries couldn’t offload the substance in the U.S., what were they doing with it?

Through a year’s worth of detective work, Webber and her beat team colleague in New Delhi, Katy Daigle, traced the shadowy network that trades in oil refineries' bottom-of-the-barrel leftovers. They found that India was the leading destination of “petcoke” from the U.S., and Indian officials had no idea the amount of petcoke flowing into the country was 20 times more than just six years before. Nor did they know how it was being used in a country already choking on some of the world’s dirtiest air.

Within 24 hours of the story hitting the wire, India’s government announced it would phase out imports of petcoke and had begun working on a policy to end the practice.

For revealing the secretive transport of petroleum coke from the U.S. to one of the world’s most polluted countries, and for drawing an immediate reaction from the government of India, Webber and Daigle win this week’s Beat of the Week.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: Vaccine production hampered by pharma patents

broke the news that governments and aid groups worldwide, along with the World Health Organization, are calling on pharmaceutical companies to share their vaccine information more broadly to meet a yawning global shortfall and inequities in vaccine distribution. The companies say they can only sign deals on a one-on-one basis to protect their intellectual property, but critics believe they have broader obligations because they took taxpayer money to develop the vaccines. The London-based correspondents found three factories on three continents whose owners say they could start producing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines on short notice if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how. A former director of chemistry at Moderna confirmed that, and photographer Al-emrun Garjon delivered photos of a high-tech factory in Bangladesh producing vaccine at about 25% of its capacity.After the AP story ran, the head of WHO, citing a health emergency, called for patent rights to be waived until the end of the pandemic so that vaccine supplies can be dramatically increased. https://bit.ly/38vMgXI

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: FDA skipped most baby formula plant inspections in 2020

turned seemingly mundane testimony of a legislative hearing into a timely scoop, breaking the news that the Food and Drug Administration had skipped nearly all its inspections of baby formula plants during the first year of COVID, likely contributing to the severe shortage of formula in the U.S. and raising questions about what the federal government could have done to prevent it.Using information he gleaned from Capitol Hill testimony by the three top baby formula manufacturers, Washington-based health writer Perrone identified the companies’ plants in the FDA’s online database and discovered the agency hadn’t inspected Abbott’s plant — responsible for a recall of formula that exacerbated the nationwide shortage — for two years between 2019 and 2021. In fact, the FDA later acknowledged only three of the nation’s 23 formula plants were inspected in the first year of the pandemic.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP gives voice to Ohioans leaving homes for semiconductor plant

delivered an all-formats package weaving together the personal, political and economic implications of a planned $20 billion Intel semiconductor manufacturing complex in rural Johnstown, Ohio, where homes are being demolished to make way for the project that will bring jobs to the “Silicon Heartland.”Knowing that customers look to the AP for this kind of business enterprise story, the journalists set out to illustrate the changing landscape around the project, literally and figuratively, as two Intel factories are expected to open in 2025 on the nearly 1,000-acre site. Framing the coverage, the team interviewed the extended family of 85-year-old Tressie Corsi at her longtime home, grounding the all-formats package in the lives of those most directly affected by the Intel project.Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Exclusive data, intrepid reporting reveals how the FDA has fallen behind in efforts to control e-cigarettes appealing to kids

exposed the truth: The number of e-cigarettes on the market has exploded in recent years, a surge driven almost entirely by disposable e-cigarettes imported from China.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP takes readers inside the secretive world of maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal

AP got rare access to see how the U.S. government and contractors maintain the highly classified U.S. nuclear arsenal.Read more