Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Vivid detail, compelling visuals showcase aftermath of Northern California earthquake

delivered compelling text, photos and video that depicted the chaos and sense of community spirit that followed a magnitude 6.4 earthquake in a remote stretch of rural Northern California, putting strong all formats coverage on the wire despite issues with cell service and internet. Beam and Vasquez were awoken by early morning phone calls from editors to head far north in the aftermath of a 6.4-magnitude earthquake that rocked Northern California.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Powerful ‘voices’ package marks year of the pandemic

coordinated and executed an ambitious multiformat package giving voice to a diverse group of people whose lives have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Williams and Hicks came up with the original idea on a brainstorming call. Balilty shot the first portrait and set the style and technical parameters to ensure a much-needed uniformity of style, look and feel to the project. Goodman was integral in to the vast majority of back-end and presentation work on images, and Selsky knit together a disparate collection of quotes into a compelling text accompaniment.Evidence of the project’s overall strength, it became AP’s main story on March 11, the one year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a pandemic.https://bit.ly/3bWNbmohttps://bit.ly/3bYK5hL

Best of the Week — First Winner

As families respond to the crisis, AP reveals desperate state of Venezuelan COVID treatment

Venezuela was one of the least-prepared countries in the world to fight the coronavirus. But it has arguably succeeded on one front: suppressing news of the virus’s true impact on its people. The country has acknowledged only 814 COVID deaths. But this Caracas-based all-formats AP team scored a breakthrough, telling the actual story in a country where contradicting the government’s official narrative can lead to detention.

Documenting two women working to ensure the survival of their fathers, the AP journalists delivered a hard-won, startling and exclusive look at the bleak state of health care and the plight of relatives who risk their own lives to care for loved ones in the COVID-19 wing of a rundown public hospital.

For their determination and courage to report this story and expose Venezuela’s ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Smith, Cubillos and Arraez earn AP’s Best of the Week honors.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Landslide engulfs Chinese village; scores missing

for heading to the southwestern city of Mianyang as soon as news broke that a landslide had engulfed a village and capturing dramatic photos and video from the site. http://apne.ws/2t4urt7

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Video of Merkel shaking turns routine live shot into a top story

for alertly elevating a routine ceremony into the day’s top visual story. Kienoel noticed that German Chancellor Angela Merkel looked unwell, and focused his video camera on her as she began to shake uncontrollably. Then he discretely phoned from the crowded media scrum to flag the episode for staffers in all formats, resulting in a text story and a video edit that moved ahead of any competitor.https://bit.ly/2KFefKrhttps://bit.ly/2KFTFJX

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Unique, enterprising video stories win Tour de France viewers

for a series of nearly 20 videos from the Tour de France, using iPhone and GoPro to create short-form, customer-ready products. The videos drove traffic to their comprehensive text coverage of the race itself as well as “Taste of the Tour,” their daily series of entertaining, informative and entirely exclusive cross-format stories exploring the people, places, cuisine and hidden tales in the regions crossed by the Tour. They shot video and interviews in the early morning, before starting long days covering each stage, then edited their video stories in the car as they drove hundreds of miles to the stage finish, where they then leapt back into race coverage. On Twitter alone, the video series racked up close to 300,000 views, more than covering the pair’s modest wine tab.https://bit.ly/2yvemQshttps://bit.ly/2Ktu58Dhttps://bit.ly/2SUr7O2https://bit.ly/2K9dvMihttps://bit.ly/2YvHXbj

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

A child's scraped knee a life or death matter in Venezuela

for being the first to get inside access to hospitals in Caracas for a powerfully reported story about unhealthy conditions. http://apne.ws/2dGMQsa

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Agency exclusive video of Ted Cruz in Cancun

collaborated to give the AP an agency exclusive with video of Sen. Ted Cruz at Cancun’s airport as he was returning to the U.S. amid the backlash over leaving Texas during the deadly winter storm.Triboulard, senior producer in Mexico City, had alerted Rojas about the potential scandal brewing in the U.S. and Rojas, freelance Cancun video journalist, immediately began reaching out to local contacts after images started circulating on Twitter purporting to show Cruz en route to Cancun with his family. After hearing the senator was booked on a return flight early that afternoon, she rushed to the airport and was there when he showed up to check in. Rojas followed the visibly annoyed Cruz through the terminal to the security checkpoint, getting not just video but also eliciting comment from the senator, who said that he was headed home to work on helping Texans. Cruz’s comments were immediately included in the AP’s text story. A competitive agency had to obtain video of Cruz from its Mexican partner, Telemundo, moving it more than an hour after AP’s fast file. https://bit.ly/2ZSVsRf

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP delivers rare visuals inside deadly Bangladesh factory fire

managed to get where other journalists did not: inside a tragic factory fire that killed dozens of workers who were locked inside the food and beverage factory outside Bangladesh’s capital. Police initially gave a toll of three dead, but the following afternoon firefighters discovered 49 more bodies, many of whom were trapped inside by an illegally locked door.Video journalist Garjon and photographer Opu had scrambled to the scene as soon as the scale of the tragedy became clear. Once there, they got inside the factory and despite intense heat and smoke, captured dramatic scenes of firefighters, with Garjon setting up an exclusive livestream using the Bambuser app on his iPhone as rescuers searched for bodies amid the burning debris. The pair’s video and and still images of firefighters’ efforts and the grim consequences of the blaze set AP's all-formats coverage apart on this latest industrial disaster in Bangladesh.https://aplink.video/196https://aplink.news/yothttps://aplink.video/wsq

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Powerful visuals of locked-down town at center of Italy’s virus outbreak

ensured AP was among the first media to get photos and video from the locked-down Northern Italian town of Codogno, the focal point of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak.https://bit.ly/32Sp69Zhttps://bit.ly/3aw4OWGhttps://bit.ly/32US5df

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Focused on learning loss, AP’s reporting asks: Are adults doing enough to help vulnerable kids?

doggedly focused on kids’ academic recovery, delivered a powerful tale about adults trying – and failing – to change school in the face of massive pandemic learning loss.

Previous reporting on pandemic-related education issues uncovered this tale of two districts: Facing Richmond kids’ massive learning losses, the superintendent had already tried twice to extend the school year – something experts recommended for struggling kids to get more time with teachers. Teachers, wealthy parents and school board members had defeated the proposal, leaving supporters bereft. But in Hopewell, backing from teachers and low-income parents had led to the unthinkable – the remaking of the academic calendar, introducing year-round school.Read more.

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Views of AP exclusive video series 'The Olympians' approach 400,000 in first week

for a months-long project by AP Sports to create profiles of many of the athletes who will be starring at the Pyeongchang Olympics, and ended up with an exclusive series giving fans an inside look with more than two dozen videos about what makes an Olympian. https://wintergames.ap.org/the-olympians

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP has exclusive agency live video from Taiwan derailment

for leading the AP’s live coverage from the site of a Taiwan train derailment. AP was the only agency to provide a live feed, but more than the exclusivity, our live was used even by clients in Taipei because our angle was better than theirs, thanks to Lai. https://bit.ly/2yOpybB

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Video, photos lead competitive coverage of Florida crash

for speed and resourcefulness that gave AP video and photos a clear win over the competition, providing live, distinctive close-up visuals of a commercial jet that skidded into a river from a military base runway. Replogle broadcast first agency live video from a unique vantage point on a resident’s dock, then he and McCullough secured a speedboat for an even closer look, again sending live video and exclusive stills. https://bit.ly/2JgrtfYhttps://bit.ly/2V7ekaEhttps://bit.ly/2PQtCj1

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP: US envoy secretly visited Venezuela on hostage mission

combined sleuthing and great source reporting to break a story that the Biden administration was trying to keep secret: that the U.S. government's top hostage negotiator was secretly visiting Venezuela as part of an ongoing effort to secure the release of jailed Americans, including American oil executives known as the Citgo 6.The AP pair has followed the case since the 2017 detention of the oil executives. When Latin America correspondent Goodman learned that a U.S. government flight was traveling toward Venezuela, he flagged it to Washington-based national security reporter Tucker, who quickly confirmed with sources that the plane was carrying Roger Carstens, the U.S. government’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. They spent the next several days reporting the details of Carstens’ visit. Goodman pressed multiple sources to learn Carstens visited American detainees behind bars and had also met with aides to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.Tucker, who has a history of reporting on hostage and detainee cases, then landed an exclusive interview with Carstens after he was safely out of Venezuela. The envoy shared first-hand details of his visit with the prisoners.The result was a vivid tale of the first known face-to-face outreach in Venezuela by a senior U.S. official since at least 2019. It earned widespread attention from CNN, which gave AP prominent credit, and other major news outlets. The story was even bigger in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin and South America. And while others eventually reported their own stories, they did not get Carstens. His lone interview was with AP. https://aplink.news/i7u

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Exclusive visuals of largest COVID-19 final-round test

delivered impressive, carefully negotiated all-formats coverage as a leading U.S. COVID-19 vaccine candidate began final-round testing with volunteers in Binghamton, New York. The exclusive images – photo and video – were heavily played worldwide. The coverage also included an update on the original volunteers who received injections in Washington State in March.https://bit.ly/33ALS8Hhttps://bit.ly/3i9Jmue

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

AP dominates visual coverage of Hong Kong extradition clashes

for dominating agency coverage – video and photos – of clashes between Hong Kong police and anti-extradition protesters who gathered around Hong Kong’s Legislative Council complex on June 12.

Only AP was live when the first scuffle broke out between police and protesters early that morning. And when more violent clashes erupted, only AP’s Wober captured dramatic ground footage as protesters started throwing objects at police who eventually used tear gas, rubber bullets and other measures to disperse the crowds. The dramatic unmatched 30-minute clip was widely used by major clients, including Hong Kong’s own South China Morning Post.

Photographers Yu and Cheung, meanwhile, worked tirelessly from late the previous night, as protesters staked out positions, and through the next day as the protests grew and were eventually shut down. Prominent photo play included the front of Time magazine and The Times of London.https://bit.ly/2XmPRDjhttps://bit.ly/2FiU6W3https://bit.ly/2x7tzXu

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Young Italian man describes desperate effects of virus

conducted a gripping video interview with a 33-year-old Italian lawyer and water polo player about the man’s battle with COVID-19, underscoring how the disease not only hits the elderly or those with underlying health conditions. Santalucia interviewed Andrea Napoli by Skype and filmed him waving from a hotel that is being used for patients recovering from the coronavirus. The video and a text story by Milan correspondent Colleen Barry won widespread play. https://bit.ly/39x7cLX

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Sourcing, viral video sets AP apart on women’s NCAA tournament

used his access to newsmakers in women’s basketball to deliver powerful multiplatform coverage of AP’s coach and player of the year, including video that has topped a half-million views and counting.Feinberg, the preeminent sports writer in women’s hoops, continues to separate AP’s coverage from the competition. While anchoring coverage of the women’s NCAA Tournament, Feinberg was able to get the parents of University of Maryland’s Brenda Frese to surprise her with the coach of the year news via a Zoom call during a team practice, with AP video recording the moment. And he arranged for UConn coach Geno Auriemma to surprise Bueckers, presenting her with the player of the year award in front of the team. Said AP Global Sports Editor Michael Giarrusso: “It’s (Doug’s) source-building that gets us this kind of access. Everyone is sharing the video ... including some of our biggest customers and competitors.”https://bit.ly/3uKVEQjhttps://bit.ly/3t0PISEhttps://bit.ly/2Q3vvguhttps://bit.ly/3mr6acq

Beat of the Week

(Honorable Mention)

Standout photo, video coverage of Lebanon demonstrations

for outstanding visual coverage of the protests that have enveloped Lebanon, including beautifully produced edits of clashes between anti- and pro-government demonstrators, dramatic live video that captured the destruction of the protest camp by Hezbollah supporters, and consistently powerful photo coverage.https://bit.ly/32rFtc5https://bit.ly/2pCXWFf