Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP analysis: Manufacturers of generic opioids fueled crisis

delivered a fast, smart follow-up after U.K.-based Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals announced a U.S. settlement over its role in the opioid epidemic. The team’s analysis revealed that Mallinckrodt and one other generic drug manufacturer were responsible for the vast majority of high-dosage prescription painkillers – billions of generic pills – distributed throughout the U.S. during the height of the opioid epidemic. https://bit.ly/2IoXuQG

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP wins access as opioids victims confront Purdue’s Sackler family

leveraged years of source building and evenhanded reporting on opioid litigation in the U.S., securing rare access in all formats to an unprecedented federal court hearing in the most high-profile opioids case in the U.S.In the virtual hearing, people who had become addicted to opioids, and the parents of children lost to addiction, would finally confront members of the family that owned Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin. Mulvihill overcame federal court restrictions to get full access to the Zoom link for the hearing, and he leaned on his relationship with victims’ attorneys to have a multiformat team at a law firm as victims made emotional statements to members of the Sackler family. Read more

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Preparation, context put AP ahead on opioids verdict against pharmacies

used planning, prep material and contextualized coverage to put AP well ahead of the competition when a federal jury in Cleveland held pharmacy chains responsible for their role in the opioids crisis. The jury found CVS, Walgreens and Walmart pharmacies recklessly distributed massive amounts of pain pills in two Ohio counties.Seewer and Mulvihill drafted prep that included not only the possible jury decisions but their potential impact on the larger landscape of opioids litigation. They also planned how to get the story out quickly, Seewer making sure AP was literally well-positioned, planting himself outside the courtroom waiting for the verdict. The result: an urgent filing by the East Desk’s Jeff McMillan that beat major competitors by at least 20 minutes, delivering remarkably strong play.Swift teamwork added reaction from both sides, as Seewer talked with lawyers at court while Mulvihill got statements from the companies and reached out to other sources. Photos prepared in advance were quickly linked, and the reporters also helped ensure AP had video of lawyers reacting to the verdict.The pair followed up the next day with even more context in a smart story that unspooled the central argument of the case — that the pharmacies creating a “public nuisance” with their dispensing — and looked ahead to how the verdict could affect other litigation and communities that want to hold pharmacies accountable.https://aplink.news/i6jhttps://aplink.news/qa9https://aplink.video/g20

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP package from Australia reveals global ravages of opioids

for months of careful relationship building with opioid addicts and their loved ones, resulting in a richly-detailed package about opioid addiction in Australia, where stigma around addiction remains high. The stories revealed how drug companies and the Australian government have contributed to the crisis, and an intimate narrative provided striking detail about the pain and impact of opioid dependency on addicts and their families. To find the right subjects, Gelineau contacted countless rehab centers, doctors, pain groups, nonprofits and addiction specialists, combed through online forums and social media and read through thousands of signatures on petitions related to opioid abuse. Putting the pieces together also required painstaking sifting through data from Australia’s de-centralized health system and 12 years of coroners’ reports to find early warnings about the opioid crisis. The work resonated with readers, and the director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which funded the stories, called them “stellar journalism ... so well told and presented,” while the mother profiled in the team’s narrative piece wrote to Gelineau, “I’m so grateful for having met you, Sam and Goldie. You have given me a voice.”https://bit.ly/2kebqV7https://bit.ly/2lKn9ez

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Only on AP: Opioids too costly, Rwanda makes own morphine

for revealing how Rwanda is making and distributing its own morphine to provide painkillers for its people, who cannot afford other opioids or the more expensive morphine manufactured by global drug manufacturers.https://bit.ly/2s4YDImhttps://bit.ly/2T59vB4

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Another AP beat on synthetic opioids: China announcing carfentanil ban

for breaking the news that China is banning the powerful and deadly synthetic opioid carfentanil, the latest in a series of AP beats detailing China’s role in the U.S. opioid epidemic. http://apne.ws/2kAwWgG

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Opioids and other drugs stolen from VA hospitals

for an exclusive story on the theft of opioids and other drugs from VA facilities. http://bit.ly/2lw8TRs

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Exclusive: A young mayor and a fatal attraction to opioids

for a sensitive portrayal of the family of a 24-year-old Pennsylvania mayor whose cause of death a year ago had been kept under wraps. The family gave a detailed and heartbreaking account of his heroin overdose, enabling a hugely compelling story and beautiful portraits that generated high praise and AP chart-topping engagement from readers across the country, and front-page play in papers from one end of the state to the other. https://bit.ly/2Lh2jvU

Best of the States

The ‘Left Behind’; AP profiles the other victims of opioids

As the opioid epidemic barrels into its third decade, it’s increasingly hard to find fresh ways to report on the problem. One group that has always been present, usually in the background of stories, are the parents, hundreds of thousands of them who desperately tried to save their children, then buried them anyway. Louisville, Kentucky-based national writer Claire Galofaro chose to focus on them, the survivors who have lost the most to the epidemic.

The project involved journalists across formats throughout the country – Jae Hong, Steven Senne, Pat Semansky, Jeff Roberson, Mark Humphrey, Rodrique Ngowi, Krysta Fauria, Dario Lopez, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Carla Johnson – teaming with Galofaro and enterprise editors Pauline Arrillaga, Jeannie Ohm, Raghu Vadarevu and Enric Marti to think creatively about how text, video, multimedia and photos could work together.

The result was two beautifully written narratives paired with photographs, an extensive Q&A about the epidemic, a full video story and three digital videos in which we hear three different mothers talking about the extreme lengths they went to to try and save their children.

The series struck a raw nerve – engagement was extraordinary: The main story was No. 1 on apnews.com the day it ran, and it appeared on newspaper front pages nationwide. A week later, news outlets were still using it. Hundreds of readers sent emails and tweets. More than one person said that they felt like they were sitting with these families in their living rooms.

For a cross-format effort so intimate, so devastating, it recaptured the attention of a nation that had been exhausted by stories about the opioid epidemic, the team that produced the Left Behind package wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Stunning package documents lives of women jailed for opioids

for their stunning all-formats package on life behind bars for women who were jailed because of opioid addiction. https://bit.ly/2J7ySOb

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Opioids scoop: Reporters expose Italian probe of Purdue’s foreign affiliate

for breaking the news that executives with the international arm of Purdue Pharma were caught up in a criminal investigation in Italy alleging they paid a doctor to help sell more opioids in the country. It’s the first known criminal case outside of the U.S. involving employees with the pharmaceutical empire owned by the Sackler family, and the the first in an investigative series about the spread of opioids overseas. The reporters found that the doctor wrote scientific studies and organized conferences to promote opioids as safe and effective for chronic pain patients – the same tactics that experts and attorneys general say Purdue and other companies used in the U.S. that laid the foundation for the addiction crisis.https://bit.ly/2EG0sOZhttps://www.apnews.com/GlobalOpioids

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP leads all-formats coverage of opioids settlement, victims

spearheaded all-formats coverage of the landmark opioid bankruptcy settlement involving OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma while keeping victims’ voices at the forefront.In the days leading up to the settlement, Mulvihill — a member of AP’s State Government Team who has been AP’s lead writer on dozens of opioid cases in recent years — wrote preparedness, contacted all the key parties to understand what the federal judge might do, and lined up numerous victims and opioid treatment advocates for comment. He and others coordinated with photo and video journalists to ensure strong visuals on the day of the settlement and to accompany a victim-focused story for the next news cycle.When the Purdue decision was imminent, Mulvihill immediately contacted the filing team, prompting the team to alter the prepared alert and story lead to more accurately reflect what the judge was deciding. He then co-reported the follow-up story that focused on how opioid victims and their families were reacting to the end of the legal case against Purdue. He also turned around a weekend story about the issue central to the coming appeals process — the controversial legal immunity given to Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family.Mulvihill’s work continually kept AP out front on a hotly competitive story that was watched closely by millions across the U.S. who have been affected by the crisis.https://aplink.news/a34https://aplink.news/4pphttps://aplink.news/jkvhttps://aplink.video/8j0

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Exclusive: $200M fund for opioid treatment sits unused

broke the news that a $200 million fund intended to help opioid addicts has been sitting unused for more than a year. Mulvihill has maintained his sourcing and has followed various opioids cases, even during a year focused on the coronavirus and U.S. elections. His attention to the opioids beat paid off with an exclusive story revealing that as part of its bankruptcy case, Purdue Pharma had set aside $200 million to help local communities and nonprofits serve people addicted to opioids. Yet more than a year after the fund was established, not a penny had been spent because state attorneys general and lawyers representing local governments couldn’t agree on who should be in charge of distributing the money. Advocates for addiction treatment were outraged. One lawyer representing overdose victims called it “a tragedy of epic proportions” that the money had not been spent. Portraits by Richmond, Virginia, photographer Steve Helber, of a woman who lost her twin brother to addiction, complemented the story. https://bit.ly/3lF6rX0

Best of the States

AP Exclusive: Confidential toxicology report details Prince overdose

In the nearly two years since Prince’s sudden drug overdose death in 2016, Minneapolis reporter Amy Forliti has closely tracked the criminal investigation into his death, cultivating sources who could help her break developments along the way, including the possibility of criminal charges.

A medical examiner's scant one-page report had cited an accidental overdose of fentanyl as the cause of Prince’s death, but provided almost no other detail. Forliti had pursued a copy of the autopsy and toxicology report ever since from multiple sources. She finally obtained the confidential toxicology report on March 26.

Forliti talked to three experts not involved in the case who analyzed blood and liver readings in the report and characterized them as “exceedingly high” – as one expert put it, they were very high even for a chronic pain patient. The details were something no other media could match.

Forliti's exclusive was widely played. It led the Minneapolis Star Tribune's website for hours and made the printed paper, a rarity for a story on which they compete with AP. CNN referenced the story on-air and online with credit to AP.

For relentlessly working her sources to break news on a long-simmering story, Amy Forliti wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the States

Reporters spotlight burgeoning crisis: More kids entering foster care due to the opioid epidemic

They are the littlest victims of the opioid crisis: Tens of thousands of children forced into foster care because of a parent’s drug use. On Nov. 30, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released data from 2016 showing new foster care cases involving parents using drugs have hit the highest point in more than three decades of record-keeping.

Less than two weeks after that data was released, the AP transmitted a package of stories focused on two of the states with the biggest one-year increases: Indiana and Georgia.

The project came about thanks to an analysis begun months earlier by Washington-based data journalist Meghan Hoyer. Hoyer worked with an analyst to access exclusive county-level data on foster care entries over the past 15 years, giving the AP a unique, comprehensive and localized look at the issues surrounding children entering the system.

That data allowed New York-based national writers Matt Sedensky to focus his reporting in Indiana, where parental drug use was increasingly cited as the reason for foster care removals. Sedensky convinced the chief juvenile court judge to grant him access to courtrooms and files normally shielded from public view. He also worked to get a caseworker to let him follow her as she visited families caring for children removed from their birth parents’ custody, and spent time with adoptive families, medical professionals and others affected.

A second story, by national writer David Crary, also based in New York, zoomed in on one mother who had lost her three daughters to foster care and her battle to overcome addiction and win them back. In interviews and email exchanges over several months, mother of three Kim Silvers told wrenching details of her experience – including an interview at her joyous graduation ceremony after completing the program.

For providing moving insight into the plight of the youngest victims of the opioid crisis and the struggle of some families to break free, Hoyer, Sedensky and Crary share this week’s Best of the States prize.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: Overdose deaths for Black American soar during pandemic

teamed up to make AP first to report on how the pandemic exacerbated the spread of opioid addiction among Black Americans. Their story focused on St. Louis, bringing to light a new consequence of the coronavirus and racial injustice, major themes of the past year, showing that the pandemic accelerated a trend that was already in the works: The spread of opioid addiction from mostly rural, white communities to more urban, Black neighborhoods. The reporting placed this trend squarely in a history of drug addiction in America that has long discriminated against Black people, and described how even today, the best drug abuse treatment is more accessible to white people than to Black people. As one doctor put it, the soaring death rate from drug addiction has become a pressing civil rights issue. The story was sensitively told in text, photos and video, with poignant details, including one mother fearing her son’s overdose death for so long that she paid for his funeral in monthly installments. The care taken in telling this story was rewarded with AP’s second-highest reader engagement metrics of the day.https://aplink.news/ak7https://aplink.video/ce5https://aplink.photos/kgr

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Keen eye, sharp beat work spin exclusive enterprise off routine Legislative coverage

Sharp beat work and a keen news sense helped AP elevate routine Legislative coverage of a drug bill into an all-formats feature that used the gut-wrenching story of a tribe that’s losing one member a week to opioid overdose to illustrate why readers should care about an obscure bill overlooked by every other media outlet.Read more

Best of the States

AP team embeds in West Virginia city seeing a resurgence of addiction amid the pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic killed more than a half-million Americans, it also quietly inflamed what had already been one of the country’s greatest public health crises: addiction. 

To tell that story, a multiformat AP team — writer Claire Galofaro, photographer David Goldman and video journalist Mike Householder — spent time in Huntington, West Virginia, exploring the resurgence of addiction in a community that had made progress against drug abuse. The AP team embedded with the city’s Quick Response team for a week, providing a unique window into the suffering those with addiction have endured as the pandemic brought despair and cut off access to support systems and health care resources.

The evocative package resonated with readers, and the story’s main subject said she was “ecstatic” over how well the story captured the world she sees every day.

For sensitive and compelling coverage that furthers the AP’s efforts to explore the rippling consequences of COVID-19, the team of Galofaro, Goldman and Householder wins this week’s Best of the States award.

Best of the States

AP breaks news on the opioid epidemic and Purdue Pharma, with focus on victims

AP reporters from three different teams broke distinctive, significant stories on the continuing drug overdose crisis in the U.S., which has been overshadowed this year by the coronavirus pandemic:

— A state-level report showing that overdose deaths are on pace to reach an all-time high this year, and that overdoses increased after the virus began spreading in the U.S.— An accountability story on President Donald Trump’s handling of the opioid crisis, and how the issue has been overlooked in the presidential race.— A major scoop on a settlement between the federal government and Purdue Pharma, complete with details of criminal charges and the $8 billion settlement. 

But the depth of coverage didn’t end with the major news beats. All three stories put victims at the center of the reporting. 

For revealing stories that broke news and provided a powerful reminder of an ongoing epidemic that has contributed to the deaths of more than 470,000 Americans, Mike Stobbe, Adrian Sainz, Farnoush Amiri, Geoff Mulvihill, Meghan Hoyer and Michael Balsamo win this week’s Best of the States award.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP team illustrates how billions in opioid settlement might be spent

AP produced a deep all-formats package about a community that serves as a model for what others could do with proceeds from a $50 billion opioids settlement to fight the opioids epidemic.Read more