When the pope visited an impoverished suburban neighborhood of Lisbon, during his trip to mark the first massive gathering of young Catholics since the pandemic started, AP was among the few who noticed a group of people among the crowd that had rainbow flags and distinctive signs identifying them as members of the LGBTQ+ community.Read more
AP employed the traditional Afghan “box camera” to document how life has changed in Afghanistan in peacetime, for better and worse, two years after U.S. troops left and the Taliban returned to power.Read more
AP staff across Pennsylvania delivered standout coverage of the capture of a fugitive murderer, attacking the story from multiple angles when the news broke last week.Read more
AP produced the first comprehensive, multiformat examination of Oregon’s legalization of psilocybin — “magic mushrooms” — that proponents hope will spark a revolution in mental health care, garnering national and international attention.Read more
An AP team highlighted the disproportionate effect of cash bail as a condition of pretrial release on people of color ahead of Illinois’ historic elimination of the system through stories of residents who lost jobs, homes and time with young children due to being unable to afford bail amounts.Read more
AP broke news and drove the coverage about the GOP threat to impeach a state Supreme Court justice before she’s even ruled on a case.Read more
A late-night leap into action and spot-on prep delivered AP a decisive audience win on Jimmy Buffett’s death.Read more
AP was the first media to write the story of the likely cause of the Maui fires — bare copper electrical line that sparked on contact and power poles that couldn’t stand up to the wind.Read more
AP showed how and why a major influx of Mauritanians is arriving in the United States.Read more
West Africa correspondent Sam Mednick was in Niamey — by chance to make use of a visa nearing expiration — when mutinous bodyguards launched a coup against their president. But her stellar, singlehanded all-formats coverage is due entirely to her extraordinary multimedia skills and perseverance.
Day after day, Mednick produced live video, photos of demonstrations, WhatsApp clips to colleagues and interviews on and off the record to show the importance of the coup in a country that has long been considered a bulwark of democracy against Islamic extremism and autocracy.
The result: A story that Mednick owned alone among international journalists.
For her tireless, astonishing multimedia coverage in a place where few of our competitors, if any, had a presence on the ground, we are honored to award Sam Mednick the Best of the Week — First Winner.
developed a relationship with Pat Robertson’s spokesman over several years that set AP up for a speed win on the religious and political figure’s obit.Read more.
Migration-focused video journalist Renata Brito in Barcelona took note of a heartbreaking photo on social media to spark a story about the situation at the Tunisia-Libya border — and she used her years of source work, expertise on the border and help from around AP to confirm the story.
On July 19, the photo of a woman and child lying dead, barefoot and face down in the tawny desert sand began circulating on social media. It was retweeted by activists who accused Tunisia of abandoning migrants to their fates on the other side of Tunisia’s desert border with Libya.
But little was known about the photo or the stories of the two who had died.
On social media, some said the photo spoke to that growing crisis, but others insisted it was an old image from another country.
Three days after the photo surfaced, a source of Brito’s in Libya messaged her, saying he knew the woman and child in the photo. From afar, Brito had developed a relationship with the source for years. For this story, Brito asked the source: How did he know it was them? Could she speak to friends or family? With whom did they travel?
That resulted in a tale of dashed hope and tragedy as told to the AP by the late woman’s husband, with additional details and key context contributed by Elaine Ganley and Samy Magdy, who together are Best of the Week — First Winner.
AP spent months reporting the issue of tornado deaths in mobile homes and why they still happen despite being known and avoidable.Read more
AP took advantage of deep-source work to help score a scoop on an interpretation of a state supreme court decision that made it more difficult for convicted felons to restore their voting rights.Read more
get AP access to thousands of pages of documents that gave a glimpse of the federal government’s haphazard handling of nuclear waste in the St. Louis area.Read more.
It was one of those stories that aren’t a secret, but nobody had dug in to see how it was playing out —until Laurie Kellman started to.Read more.
help show that this is more than just entertaining, but a way of life.Read more.
were dispatched to the rural Maine town to cover conflict over a plan to build a flagpole taller than the Empire State Building.Read more.
told the story of a stumbling start to a historic wildfire mitigation effort intended to avoid a repeat of the climate-driven conflagrations that destroyed Western communities in recent years.Read more.
AP learned from sources that U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped giving appointments for asylum through the CBP One mobile app in Laredo, Texas.Read more
