for reporting exclusively how a staunch Congressional opponent of government spending has spent more than $3 million to promote himself – at times outside of his district – as he runs for U.S Senate. http://bit.ly/2odQqMV
for spotting a trend in the nation’s ongoing heroin epidemic: multiple overdoses in libraries around the country. The resulting story, which she reported and wrote while working BNS shifts, was No. 10 on Mobile over the weekend and got strong social media use. http://apne.ws/2cwDYSD
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 cataloging more than 100 industrial spills from Hurricane Harvey in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle; most of the spills were never investigated by officials. https://bit.ly/2IgkGyi
for obtaining the most comprehensive state data so far to report that California marijuana and marijuana products are failing safety tests at a nearly 20 percent clip.https://bit.ly/2QPJYZ0https://bit.ly/2xDipcZ
Police videos of officers shooting unarmed black men have sparked angry protests in Chicago, Sacramento and other U.S. cities. But AP’s Ryan Foley wondered: Is it the norm for departments to release footage from body-worn and dashboard cameras?
Foley, based in Iowa City, Iowa, a member of AP’s state government team, investigated and found that many departments routinely deny public access to their videos of officer-involved shootings and other uses of force.
Foley filed open records requests related to roughly 20 recent use-of-force incidents in a dozen states. His letters were met with denial after denial as police departments routinely cited a broad exemption to state open records laws: They claimed that releasing the video would undermine an ongoing investigation. But critics say the exemption is often misapplied to keep embarrassing or compromising video footage from public view.
To tell the story visually, Central Region video journalist Noreen Nasir dug through AP’s archives to highlight the moments and emotions that followed the deaths of unarmed black men, including the fatal police shooting of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. She also interviewed a woman in North Dakota whose brother died after being shot in the back of the head during a struggle with police, adding a crucial perspective to the video.
At the same time, Panagiotis Mouzakis, multimedia animation producer in London, used the many denial letters Foley had collected to create a video graphic that was incorporated into Nasir’s video, and Beat Team visuals editor Alina Hartounian developed a social plan that helped the package find a huge audience.
For shining a light on how police departments continue to withhold visual evidence and for devising creative ways to illustrate the story, Foley, Nassir and Mouzakis share this week’s Best of the States award.
picked up on a seemingly mundane local story: A state working group was looking into problems with Oregon’s public defense system. That seed led the Portland-based reporter to interview attorneys, private investigators and a suspect in an attempted murder, revealing that the combination of a post-pandemic glut of delayed cases and the state’s severe shortage of public defenders means hundreds of low-income defendants don’t have legal representation — sometimes in serious felony cases — and judges have dismissed several dozen cases.Flaccus found similar crises unfolding from Maine to New Mexico. And she showed the many painful repercussions of the problem, highlighting how young victims of sex abuse and trafficking are hesitant to come forward because of disillusionment with the system.Read more
for breaking news on retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s health and her withdrawal from public life. Gresko’s exclusive that O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice, was affected by short-term memory issues led to O’Connor’s announcement that she had dementia – and probably Alzheimer’s. https://bit.ly/2zi1Kwe
While it is widely understood that U.S. public health departments have suffered budget cuts over the years, a collaborative AP/Kaiser Health News team used data and deep reporting to show exactly how expansive those cuts have been.
The investigation by AP’s Michelle Smith, Meghan Hoyer and Mike Householder, teamed with KHN’s Lauren Weber, Laura Ungar, Hannah Recht and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, drew on data from disparate sources and interviews with more than 150 people to reveal a system starved of money and staff for years, and facing more cuts amid the worst health crisis in a century.
The team’s all-formats package drew kudos and high-profile reaction from health officials, to the halls of Congress, to editorial pages.
For an ambitious story that laid bare the state of America’s public health system, the joint AP/KHN team of Smith, Hoyer, Householder, Weber, Ungar, Recht and Barry-Jester shares this week’s Best of the States award.
for obtaining a police report that said a Tesla that crashed while in Autopilot mode in Utah had accelerated in the seconds before it smashed into a stopped firetruck. https://bit.ly/2JfPdAB
for an investigation revealing that a dozen potentially lifesaving Transportation Department safety regulations have been sidelined in the Trump administration’s push to cut red tape. http://bit.ly/2HfgVbU
Beyond its dramatic effects, the audio from 911 calls can provide the kind of context that is essential to the public's understanding of what happened during a newsworthy crime or emergency. Those recordings are, with few exceptions, a matter of public record. That almost changed this year in Iowa, where the state House passed – unanimously – a bill that would end the public's ability to access many 911 calls. The bill eventually died after an outcry from the media, watchdog groups and civil rights organizations, but it was not unusual. A months-long project by AP reporters and data journalists found more than 150 bills introduced in state legislatures this year that were intended to eliminate or limit public access to a wide range of government records and meetings.
To help reporters find, track and provide input on those bills, Serdar Tumgoren and Seth Rasmussen of the data team created a unique online tool that provided full access to AP customers.
Called the Sunshine Hub, it helps users keep track of legislative activity related to government transparency, suggest new bills, search for and categorize bills for research purposes, and discuss legislation with others. The Sunshine Hub directly complemented stories by Ryan Foley in Iowa, Andrew DeMillo in Arkansas and Laurie Kellman in Washington.
For their groundbreaking reporting and software development, Tumgoren, Rasmussen, Foley, DeMillo and Kellman win this week's Best of the States award.
After a New Jersey commuter train crashed into the Hoboken station, killing one woman and injuring more than 100 people, it became clear that there would be no quick answer to what caused the accident. But that didn’t stop East Social Media Editor Michael Sisak from wanting to know more about the deeper issues plaguing New Jersey Transit.
Sisak began diving into federal data and, working with New York-based freelancer Michael Balsamo and Newark reporter David Porter, discovered that the transit agency had paid more in fines for safety violations than any other commuter railroad in the country over the past five years. It also had a significantly higher accident rate than the rest of the nation’s 10 largest commuter railroads.
for accountability reporting that showed New Jersey Transit has paid more in fines for safety violations than any other commuter railroad in the country over the past five years. It also had a significantly higher accident rate than the rest of the nation’s 10 largest commuter railroads. http://apne.ws/2evTGA4
for using public records to expose a Tennessee university after they fired a public radio station reporter because they feared the wrath of state lawmakers would affect funding. http://apne.ws/2oR5XkF
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.
for breaking news on positive train control technology around the deadly crash of an Amtrak train south of Seattle. http://bit.ly/2qwoibn
for spearheading a successful lawsuit to establish that emails, text messages and other records of state lawmakers in the Washington legislature are subject to public disclosure. http://bit.ly/2Bo804o
for pressing police for public records, breaking news on fresh sexual misconduct accusations against casino magnate Steve Wynn. http://bit.ly/2Fg9z7f
As the #MeToo movement spread to state capitols, AP statehouse reporters filed uniform FOIA requests with every legislature seeking information about past sexual misconduct cases and payouts to victims. The coordinated effort, overseen by State Government Team reporter David Lieb, produced some interesting numbers: roughly 70 complaints and nearly $3 million in sexual harassment settlements over the past decade.
But the real story was the information that wasn’t released.
In fact, a majority of states would not disclose records related to sexual misconduct among lawmakers. The most common response was that they had received no such complaints over the past decade, did not keep a record of any such complaints or were not legally bound to disclose the records. But Lieb's research revealed that even states with documented cases of lawmaker sexual harassment were not releasing records about those allegations – and potentially others.
Lieb worked with data editor Meghan Hoyer to organize and analyze the responses from our statehouse reporters in every state. The resulting spreadsheet was distributed to AP bureaus and customers weeks ahead of publication to allow for localizations. AP reporters in 19 states did just that, producing sidebars that in many cases landed on A1.
The mainbar and the state-by-state list of accused lawmakers received wide interest on the APNews app. The story also landed on at least 20 front pages.
For their 50-state accountability project on a topic that continues to rattle state capitols, Lieb and Hoyer win this week’s Best of the States award.
