leapt on an early, off-the-record source telling us that a seemingly low-level highway shooting with three injured was actually linked to another crime scene with four dead that had not been publicly reported yet, positioning AP to get ahead and stay ahead in a week of strong all-formats coverage.Read more.
used deep sourcing to be the first to report that former NFL player Phillip Adams was responsible for shooting six people to death in Rock Hill, South Carolin. She also broke the news that Adams was a former patient of one of the victims, prominent Dr. Robert Lesslie. Adams later killed himself.Local media outlets needed more than an hour to match Kinnard's scoop naming Adams, and major national outlets were hours behind AP — in many cases having to wait until authorities confirmed the shooter’s name during an afternoon news conference.Michelle Liu, Kinnard’s colleague in Columbia, secured interviews with neighbors and covered the news conference, while AP sports writers contributed background and interviews regarding Adams. https://bit.ly/3abe44E
The tragic stories pop up frequently in local media: a curious toddler gets hold of a gun and accidentally shoots himself or someone else. But how often does that happen? Under what circumstances? And what children are most at risk?
In a new investigative partnership, a team of reporters from the AP and USA TODAY Network spent six months seeking answers to those questions and others about accidental shootings involving minors. What they discovered is horrifying: A child dies every other day of an accidental shooting in the United States. What's more, the federal government significantly undercounts the problem.
for quick response and resourceful coverage during and after a protracted mass shooting – Thailand’s worst-ever – that left 29 people and the gunman dead. AP’s first story was filed five minutes after the alert hit the wire, and we had the first agency-produced video from the scene, in a coordinated effort by all formats as the gunman held of police for some 16 hours.https://bit.ly/2OQAzBihttps://bit.ly/3bybsghhttps://bit.ly/39y6kaghttps://bit.ly/2UNTRuThttps://bit.ly/2UNAJgt
for a joint investigation by the AP and USA TODAY Network that found accidental shootings involving young children often go unpunished, even when adults recklessly store loaded guns within easy reach. http://apne.ws/2rAJ9JO http://apne.ws/2qWZiGV http://apne.ws/2qX4ydz http://apne.ws/2qhlBpw
landed a clean scoop on the death of director-producer Ivan Reitman thanks to her reputation for professionalism on the film beat. Los Angeles-based Bahr received a call from a source during the Super Bowl, saying the 75-year-old Reitman had died and the family trusted her to break the story. That set Bahr and AP into motion on an obit that made news, even on a busy Sunday night. Read more
A mother shot fatally shot in front of her 3-year-old son. A suspect killed while an officer tried to handcuff him. A Homeland Security agent was shot at a Texas high school by a U.S. marshal fumbling with equipment. These are among the more than 1,400 unintentional discharges found by Seattle reporter Martha Bellisle in an investigation that highlights the shortcomings of police weapons training.
No agency tracks how often local, state and federal officers accidentally fire their weapons. Over the course of more than a year, Bellisle exhaustively documented 1,422 unintentional discharges by 258 law enforcement agencies since 2012.
With contributions from colleagues in photo and video – including the story of an Iowa woman who was killed when an officer’s gun discharged, leaving her husband and children still scarred by the tragedy – the all-formats package received prominent play.
For an exclusive that sheds light on a virtually undocumented area of firearms safety, Bellisle earns this week’s Best of the States award.
An exclusive analysis conducted for AP showed that in the shadow of the pandemic, a quiet surge in non-COVID “excess deaths” in U.S. nursing homes could top 40,000 above and beyond what is normal.
To find out why, the AP team of reporters Matt Sedensky and Bernard Condon, with video journalist Allen Breed and colleagues, interviewed nursing home authorities and family members, documenting severe cases of neglect and prolonged isolation for residents not infected with the virus, much of it due to chronic understaffing. The text story and video piece received prominent play and were among the most widely viewed on the AP News app on the day of publication.
For exposing a grim consequence of the pandemic affecting an already vulnerable population, the team of Sedensky, Condon and Breed earns this week’s Best of the States award.
As video journalist Carrie Antlfinger awaited a news conference outside a Chicago hospital where a gunman had killed three people a day earlier, a deliveryman waiting for the emergency room to reopen showed her a photo he had taken.
The cellphone photo captured a pivotal moment in the story – the shooter standing next to his first victim, his former fiancee, whom he had shot in front of the hospital.
Antlfinger, who had been dispatched from Milwaukee to cover the breaking story, immediately recognized the value of the image and the man’s firsthand account. While the deliveryman was at first reluctant, Antlfinger was able to persuade him not only to provide the AP with the photo but to go on camera for an interview describing what he saw: the gunman standing over the body with a handgun in his hand, police pulling up to the scene and the gunman shooting at police.
Antlfinger’s scoops – central to the AP’s second-day coverage of the story – were part of an aggressive cross-format effort by AP staff to cover all aspects of the story from day one.
For recognizing a critical way to advance the AP’s reporting and then negotiating exclusive access to the photo and interview, Antlfinger wins this week’s Best of the States.
for learning that the immigrant charged in the killing of college student Mollie Tibbetts was using an alias, John Budd. Foley also was the only reporter to witness federal agents’ search of the farm where the suspect worked. https://bit.ly/2NqqziJ
scored repeated beats in all formats when news broke that the Seoul mayor had gone missing amid a sexual harassment complaint. AP’s late-night news alerts on the discovery of the mayor’s body were well ahead of the competition; the print story led front pages on websites worldwide and BBC cited AP in its own copy.https://bit.ly/3h3FTNnhttps://bit.ly/391u3AIhttps://bit.ly/393YG8n
did what the federal government has not: keeping count of U.S. nursing home deaths as they have exploded in the coronavirus pandemic, rising from 450 to nearly 4,000 in less than two weeks. Herschaft independently built a tally from the state health departments, and for states that don’t provide such numbers he scoured media reports on outbreaks across the nation. At the same time, Condon’s reporting added valuable context on the massive gaps that exist in government transparency on this issue. That resulted in a sweeping story that saw massive play on a very busy coronavirus weekend. https://bit.ly/2z5aMjN
for a series of scoops in the investigation of the Pensacola naval station shooting, keeping AP ahead of national and local media in the days that followed. From Farrington’s report that investigators believed the shooter hosted a dinner party where participants viewed videos of mass shootings, to Balsamo’s confirmation of the shooter’s nationality and name, the three led coverage of one of the week’s top stories. On Monday, at least 10 Florida newspapers had the AP coverage on their front pages, including the Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times and Orlando Sentinel. https://bit.ly/35leT6o
When AP reported exclusively last August that New York state was undercounting its COVID nursing home death toll by thousands, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ripped the story as part of a politically motivated “blame game.”
But the state’s own investigation, announced last week, reached a nearly identical conclusion, affirming AP’s reporting.
AP’s 2020 investigation had seized on the fact that New York counts just residents who died at nursing homes, not those who were transported to hospitals and died there. AP’s analysis of federal data indicated that the state’s official toll was undercounted by 65%, or well over 4,000 deaths.
For sharp reporting that led the media pack, withstood criticism from the governor and months later was vindicated, this week’s Best of the States award goes to Bernard Condon, Matt Sedensky and Meghan Hoyer (now data director at The Washington Post).
In a world focused on life and survival, death is often unseen, endured in private and acknowledged in glowing obituaries or tragic news stories. It’s also mostly out of the control of the person who is dying.
Now, with nine U.S. states allowing terminally ill people to end their lives with fatal drugs, thousands of people have legally chosen how and when to end their lives.
Seattle Photographer Elaine Thompson has long wanted to show the real, personal side of what often comes across as an impersonal process. She spent months looking for the right subject, getting tantalizingly close to success before plans fell through. She stuck with it, and when she found Bob Fuller, she enlisted reporter Gene Johnson to tell his story.
This week’s Best of the Week goes to the team of Elaine Thompson and Gene Johnson who chronicled how one man, in the face of death, created the party of a lifetime.
New York City police reporter Colleen Long was taking the elevator at police headquarters on a quiet Friday afternoon before the Fourth of July weekend when she overheard a couple of patrol officers suddenly talking with alarm. “Oh my God,” one of them said. “Something’s going on at Bronx Lebanon Hospital. I think an active shooter.”
Long got off on the next stop and immediately called a source as she took the stairs down to her office in the second-floor press room, known as “the shack.” By the time she got to the desk, she had enough information to call the New York City bureau with a barebones APNewsAlert: “NEW YORK (AP) — Police are responding to a report of shots fired inside a New York City hospital.”
So began a bureau-wide reporting effort on a story that would unfold in unusual detail, even in the long litany of American gun violence. For leading a team effort that put the AP out front and kept us there, Colleen Long wins the Best of the States Award and the $300 that goes with it for the second week in a row.
Reporters Hannah Schoenbaum and Lea Skene exclusively obtained the death certificate of pro-Trump commentator, Lynnette "Diamond" Hardaway to help dispel rumors and misinformation running wild on social media. After Hardaway’s sister falsely implied that a COVID vaccine had played a role during a livestreamed memorial, AP used restraint by deciding not to write about what was said about the cause of death at the memorial while waiting for an official autopsy or death certificate that the reporters had already requested. Read more.
for reacting quickly to put AP ahead of all competition on the breaking news of an active shooter at Pearl Harbor, and maintaining the competitive advantage with tremendous collaboration in all formats, including live video, throughout the day. https://bit.ly/34bHpGk
for beating local and international media with news that Philippines authorities had killed a key Abu Sayyaf commander. He also broke news that Abu Sayyaf militants were the gunmen troops clashed with in the central Bohol province, where there had been no known Abu Sayyaf presence before. http://apne.ws/2othjuf
looked behind the news of a man who was killed by police after he fired an AR-15-style rifle in an Omaha Target store. Funk located the uncle of the shooter to explore his issues with mental health.Read more.
