Best of the Week — First Winner

Resourceful post-hurricane reporting yields exclusives on Louisiana oil spills

As Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana — launching strong AP coverage that would stretch from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast — Washington-based investigative reporter Michael Biesecker contacted federal and state officials who kept telling him they had no confirmed reports of oil or chemical spills along the coast.

But Biesecker’s inspection of aerial photos by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told a different story. He found a worrying miles-long oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico off the region’s main oil and gas port, and another sheen coming from a massive oil refinery along the Mississippi River.

His persistence led to a series of exclusives on the two oil spills, including the news that divers had identified a broken undersea pipeline as the apparent source of the offshore slick.

For smart reporting that put AP ahead of the competition — and even ahead of the government and energy companies themselves — on an important environmental story in the wake of Ida, Biesecker is AP’s Best of the Week — First Winner.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

All-formats team leads coverage of California oil spill

provided a week of outstanding coverage on one of the largest oil spills in modern California history after oil leaked from a damaged underwater pipeline, washing up on Huntington Beach, otherwise known as “Surf City USA.” The all-formats coverage, including reporting on potential lapses in response by the pipeline company and the Coast Guard, kept the the story among AP’s most popular of AP’s offerings.Among the highlights, reporters Melley and Brown chased documents to find that the response by the company, Amplify Energy, and the Coast Guard was apparently delayed by hours despite reports of a suspected spill.Dazio pressed company and Coast Guard officials, both in news conferences and one-on-one, to clarify often conflicting or evasive information on the response. Taxin, meanwhile, who lives in Huntington Beach, had been first on the scene and delivered daily reporting on the cleanup. A week after the leak she wrote that while the long-term environmental effects aren’t known, the spill wasn’t the catastrophe first feared by conservationists and city officials.Video and photos virtually owned this story. Freelance photographer Chiu captured photos of oiled birds and workers painstakingly cleaning the beach, as well as drone video and stills for perspective. Video journalists Garcia and Daley offered clients a morning live shot each day and hustled to cover everything from news conferences to the cleanup effort, and reaction from local residents and business owners.https://aplink.news/yochttps://aplink.news/1qehttps://aplink.news/pznhttps://aplink.photos/udchttps://aplink.video/h9zhttps://aplink.video/5g2https://aplink.video/glu

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP Exclusive: Trump administration downplays oil conservation

for unearthing a document that showed the Trump administration doesn’t consider conserving oil an economic imperative for the U.S., breaking with decades-old policy on conservation. https://bit.ly/2o1DDfU

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Big oil asks government to protect it from climate change

for exclusively showing how nearly $4 billion in federal funding for reinforced storm surge barriers after Hurricane Harvey is being used to prioritize protecting Gulf Coast enclaves packed with oil refineries, protecting the industry that has been blamed for exacerbating climate change. https://bit.ly/2P2ZShf

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Venezuelan fishermen live, work in oil industry wasteland

for a beautifully shot all-formats package that captures the collapse of Venezuela’s once-prosperous oil industry through fishermen and women who scratch out an existence on the blackened, sticky shores of Lake Maracaibo. People cast their nets and lines in waters fouled by black gunk seeping from broken rigs that once fueled the country’s wealth. Abd spent several days in the villages of Cabimas, documenting the home life and workday of the fishers. He returned with a team including Smith and Nunes. They watched the fishermen struggle with oily nets, and interviewed women who scrub oil from fish and crabs before eating or selling them. On his second trip to Cabimas, Abd brought a 19th century-style box camera to make black and white portraits of the fishermen and industrial decay around them. The package played widely on web sites including the Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, MSN and Yahoo.https://bit.ly/2pd49quhttps://bit.ly/2Bnd5wwhttps://bit.ly/2MqwenJ

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Thousands of defects found on oil train routes

for reporting exclusively that federal inspections of oil train rail lines across the United States have uncovered tens of thousands of safety defects, including ones similar to those blamed in derailments. http://apne.ws/2ozXUuy

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

All-formats look at BP oil disaster, 10 years later

produced a comprehensive, multiformat Only on AP package marking 10 years since the fatal Deepwater Horizon explosion and massive oil spill. Three pieces ran over three days: investigative work that showed continued and increasing drilling risks, a personal look at how life has changed along the coast, and the lasting environmental impacts a decade after the disaster. https://apnews.com/DeepwaterHorizonSpill

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP finds evidence of spills at toxic site during Hurricane Harvey floods

for uncovering evidence that three chemical spills were reported to the U.S. government at one of Houston’s dirtiest toxic waste sites after Hurricane Harvey, spills the Environmental Protection Agency had not acknowledged. http://bit.ly/2hBuQS3

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Probe highlights dangers posed by aging tankers used to store oil

AP reported for a year on the 2022 fire of the Trinity Spirit, an aging oil tanker that exploded while anchored off the coast of Nigeria — the ship fit a pattern of old oil tankers put to work storing and extracting oil around the world even while on the brink of mechanical breakdowns.Read more

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP exposes palm oil labor abuses linked to the world’s top brands, major banks

While covering the Rohingya crisis, investigative reporters Robin McDowell and Margie Mason knew tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Myanmar were vulnerable to exploitation. They suspected desperate men were being tricked or sold into the massive palm oil industry that supplies some of America’s most iconic food and cosmetic brands.

Working with photographers Gemunu Amarasinghe and Binsar Bakkara, they vividly documented the horrors some workers in Malyasia and Indonesia face. Workers spoke of brutal conditions including child labor, outright slavery and allegations of rape.

Reaction was swift, with the  U.S. government saying it would block shipments from a major Malaysian producer mentioned in the story.

For exposing abuses affecting tens of thousands of workers in a global industry that manufactures a vast array of products we buy and use daily, McDowell, Mason, Amarasinghe and Bakkara win AP’s Best of the Week award.

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Georgia lawmaker deals cannabis oil in shadows of the law

Ezra Kaplan, legislative relief reporter, Atlanta, for his exclusive look into how one state lawmaker is running and funding an underground cannabis distribution network in Georgia. http://apne.ws/2oOZ07h

Best of the Week — First Winner

AP traces child labor from Southeast Asia’s palm oil fields to major brands, Girl Scout cookies

For the third installment of their groundbreaking investigation into labor abuse in Asia’s palm oil industry, reporters Robin McDowell and Margie Mason linked child labor to the supply chains of the makers of popular cereals, candies and ice creams, including KitKats, Oreos and Cap’n Crunch. They also traced the oil to that most American treat: Girl Scout cookies. 

Joined by photographers Binsar Bakkara and Mark Humphrey, and video journalist Allen Breed, their reporting found that some tens of thousands of children toil in the palm fields, some kept from school and forced to work for free or for little pay. Some are trafficked.

The framing of the story — through the eyes of a young girl in the fields in Indonesia and a Tennessee Girl Scout campaigning to have palm oil removed from the cookies — resonated with readers; reaction on social media led the Girl Scouts to address the issue with their suppliers.

For shedding unprecedented light on the children toiling in Southeast Asia’s palm oil fields, and connecting the abusive practice to major consumer brands, McDowell, Mason, Bakkara, Breed and Humphrey share AP’s Best of the Week honors for the week of Dec. 28.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP connects palm oil industry, top brands to abuse of women

followed up on their initial reporting that exposed widespread labor abuse in the palm oil industry, conducting a comprehensive investigation into the brutal treatment of women in the production of the omnipresent ingredient, including rapes by plantation supervisors, serious health issues from toxic chemicals and injuries from back-breaking loads. The pair then traced the oil produced by these women to the supply chains of top Western beauty brands — including conglomerates that make billions of dollars as they market the empowerment of women.Mason and McDowell persuaded dozens of female workers to tell their searing stories, spending months getting the women to trust them and then arranging clandestine meetings in an effort to protect the workers from retaliation by plantation owners. They bypassed the stonewalling of major Western brands that refused to say whether their products contain palm oil by using company data and U.S. Customs records to link the workers’ abuse to the brands’ palm oil supply chains.The package featured striking digital display, video and evocative photos by Indonesia-based stringer Binsar Bakkara, as well as a powerful series of closeups of workers’ hands cradling familiar products containing the fruits of their labor.The story is nearing 250,000 page views on AP News. The Clorox Company, which owns Burt’s Bees Inc., said it would raise the allegations of abuses with its suppliers, calling AP’s findings “incredibly disturbing.” https://bit.ly/3liKAV3https://bit.ly/2VeVUXRhttps://bit.ly/3mlXgfd

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Aggressive AP coverage as Venezuela releases 1 of 6 US oil executives

A team of AP reporters delivered two straight days of deeply reported, distinctive and aggressive coverage on the release by Venezuela of two American detainees, including one of the group of oil executives known as the Citgo 6 — an internationally competitive story.AP’s coverage depended on cross-border coordination between Goodman in Miami, Garcia Cano in Caracas and Tucker in Washington, all leaning on sources and hustling to track fast-moving developments in Venezuela. Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

APNewsBreak: US moves to open oil, gas leases near native sites

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

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Once praised, a settlement leaves sickened BP oil spill workers with next to nothing

Through thousands of pages of legal documents and dozens of interviews over a year and a half of reporting, the AP exclusively reported that a medical settlement and litigation from the 2010 BP Gulf oil spill left many workers with nearly nothing for illnesses attributed to cleaning up the disaster.Read more

Best of the States

AP Exclusive: Chief Texas oil regulator vacationed at the height of hurricane

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.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Big Oil is big funder of North Dakota governor’s inaugural

for tenaciously pursuing and obtaining a list of donors to new Gov. Doug Burgum's inaugural, and reporting that the majority of them came from the oil and energy sectors that play a big role in North Dakota’s economy. http://bit.ly/2iKnTg7