for producing two AP Only stories on Rockets players during the highly competitive Western Conference finals, scooping the approximately 100 credentialed media competitors.https://bit.ly/2LrcVIphttps://bit.ly/2s9vfwFhttps://bit.ly/2IIpsZZ
for breaking the news that the Army Reserve was investigating whether leaders of the unit that controls thousands of soldiers across the western U.S. had mishandled at least two sexual assault allegations in-house, rather than referring them for outside investigation as required by military police and federal law.https://bit.ly/2TyDulg
for revealing, based on an analysis of new data, that the federal government censored, withheld or said it could not find records sought by citizens, journalists and others more often last year than at any point in last decade. http://abcn.ws/2GbZNaa
for capturing exclusive video of a police van ramming into protesters. Calupitan was able to get to a higher vantage point as tensions rose, allowing him to show the full view of the incident.
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
for an exclusive report on the escalating conflict between drug traffickers and authorities in southern Spain, including unprecedented interviews with gang members operating in one of Europe’s main entry points for hashish from North Africa. https://bit.ly/2HsiEMl
The nation’s health isn’t improving. In some key measures, it’s getting worse. How is that even possible in an era of genetic medicine and other advances? And how could the AP connect that story to our customers’ own neighborhoods?
AP medical writer Mike Stobbe and data journalist Nicky Forster started with those questions and delivered a winning package on why American life expectancy is getting shorter.
The package ran shortly after the release of the CDC’s annual mortality report which found that U.S. life expectancy had declined again. To find out what was behind the numbers, Stobbe returned to West Virginia, a place he declared the unhealthiest place in America 10 years ago. He connected with people trying to get healthier, witnessed the headwinds of the opioid crisis and explained how difficult it is to improve health en masse.
Forster, meanwhile, assembled an array of data that explained what was happening around the U.S. He matched longevity estimates for more than 65,000 neighborhoods with demographics, and found striking connections to income, race and education. He then built an interactive that allowed readers to see life expectancy in their own neighborhood and wrote a sidebar on the AP’s findings.
For getting beyond the numbers for a richer understanding of why American lifespans are shrinking, and giving AP customers the data to localize their stories, Stobbe and Forster win the week’s Best of the States award.
The sprawling Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center in Xinjiang, China, is the largest such facility in China (possibly the world), holding perhaps 10,000 or more and embodying the plight of the Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities. Western news organizations have only been able to report from the outside. But the Beijing-based team of enterprise journalist Dake Kang, photographer Mark Schiefelbein and news director Ken Moritsugu managed to get a tour, making the AP the first Western news organization to report inside the facility.
They delivered a vivid package on life inside the detention center, from numbered and tagged Uyghurs sitting ramrod straight to the instructions on force-feeding in the medical room. The journalists also revealed a disturbing new trend: China is moving from the temporary detention of Uyghurs to more permanent mass incarceration of people who have committed no real crime.
The story topped AP’s reader engagement for the week and drew comment from the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who called China’s repression of the Uyghurs “horrific.”
For bringing the world rare insight into the detention centers where China holds Uyghurs, the team of Kang, Schiefelbein and Moritsugu earns AP’s Best of the Week award.
for revealing that Dow Chemical pushed the federal government to ignore the findings of federal scientists who point to a family of widely used pesticides as harmful to about 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species. https://www.apnews.com/a29073ecef9b4841b2e6cca0720...
for pitching, coordinating and producing a unique editorial effort that used exclusive content from our satellite imagery provider to recap the decade’s biggest news events – from a vantage point 36,000 kilometers (22,000 miles) in space. Axios called the project “clever” and “fascinating.” https://bit.ly/2tMIBDnhttps://yhoo.it/36ExgEa
Some stories just stick with a journalist. For AP investigative reporter Jason Dearen, a sparse 2015 announcement — three currrent or former Florida prison guards, identified by the FBI as Ku Klux Klansmen, had been arrested for plotting a former inmate’s murder — sparked a yearslong reporting effort.
Dearen’s big break came last summer when trial transcripts revealed an FBI informant was the star witness against the KKK members, his secret recordings providing a rare, detailed look at the inner workings of the klan cell and the domestic terrorism probe. Dearen and visual journalist David Goldman retraced the klansmen’s steps through Palatka, Florida, then producers Marshall Ritzel, Samantha Shotzbarger and Peter Hamlin stepped in to create a riveting online presentation.
The resulting all-formats package had immediate impact, with Florida papers featuring it on home pages and front pages, and prompting calls for investigations into white supremacy among prison workers. The story found 360,000 readers on AP News and kept them there for an average of more than five minutes — longer than any other AP story in memory.
For dogged reporting and an immersive all-formats narrative that exposes a salient, timely issue, Dearan, Goldman, Ritzel, Shotzbarger and Hamlin win AP’s Best of the Week award.
While covering the Rohingya crisis, investigative reporters Robin McDowell and Margie Mason knew tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Myanmar were vulnerable to exploitation. They suspected desperate men were being tricked or sold into the massive palm oil industry that supplies some of America’s most iconic food and cosmetic brands.
Working with photographers Gemunu Amarasinghe and Binsar Bakkara, they vividly documented the horrors some workers in Malyasia and Indonesia face. Workers spoke of brutal conditions including child labor, outright slavery and allegations of rape.
Reaction was swift, with the U.S. government saying it would block shipments from a major Malaysian producer mentioned in the story.
For exposing abuses affecting tens of thousands of workers in a global industry that manufactures a vast array of products we buy and use daily, McDowell, Mason, Amarasinghe and Bakkara win AP’s Best of the Week award.
for a forensic investigation into how the theory of Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election evolved from a vague mention into a major talking point for Trump and his allies and now stands at the heart of the president’s impeachment trial in the Senate. https://bit.ly/3718XR9
for a story pointing out that the New England Patriots would be one of the last NFL teams to start a black quarterback when Jacoby Brissett played on Sept. 22. http://bit.ly/2dkHQnL
for reacting quickly to the news Sunday night that a plane had caught fire on landing at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, killing 41 people. Highlighting a strong visual report, AP obtained the first dramatic user-generated video of the plane in flames, ahead of other western agencies and garnering huge client usage. https://bit.ly/306CgOZ
delivered two distinctive packages from Africa on vaccine hesitancy and gender inequality in the pandemic response on the continent — bolstering AP’s strong record of reporting on global inequity during the coronavirus outbreak.Teamwork and deep reporting from Gambia resulted in a visually stunning package that revealed Africa’s women as being the least vaccinated population in the world and explained why, bringing readers and viewers into the women’s lives.West Africa bureau chief Larson, senior producer Fisch and photographer Correa first focused on an oyster and fishing collective to better understand the women’s precarious financial position and why that makes them hesitant to get vaccinated. The team also trekked into Gambia’s interior, gaining the trust of a village chief who assembled his community to come talk to the AP about their fears and concerns around vaccination.The stunning package featured the women’s own voices and striking portraits, underscoring the cultural pressures the women face and the power of misinformation. A sidebar by Cheng expanded on the international scale of the problem, reinforcing AP’s commitment to covering global vaccine inequality as a major theme for 2021.Thousands of miles to the south, Zimbabwe stringer Mutsaka and photographer Mukwazhi worked relentlessly to build trust with one of Zimbabwe's leading churches, producing the first in-depth story from Africa on the role of the church in promoting vaccines. The Apostolic Christian Church has a strong distrust of modern medicine and is among the most skeptical churches in the country when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines.Mukwazhi and Mutsaka made contacts, including a church leader who was encouraging worshippers to get vaccinated, and the AP pair was permitted to cover an outdoor service where vaccinations were discussed, the congregants wrapped in white robes. The resulting all-formats package, compelling and sensitively reported, tenderly illustrated the dilemma confronting many Zimbabwean churches regarding COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.https://aplink.news/mrwhttps://aplink.news/oalhttps://aplink.news/dlrhttps://aplink.video/8nqhttps://aplink.photos/jnuhttps://aplink.news/oryhttps://aplink.video/2bp
launched AP’s grant-funded year-long series on the pandemic’s impact on women in Africa's least developed nations with this ambitious multiformat project. They tell the uplifting story of the women fish processors of Bargny, Senegal, and their tale of survival amid the economic hardships imposed by the pandemic.The package exemplified the very best in AP all-formats storytelling: stunning visual journalism complementing the reporting and driving readers and viewers deeper into the story of the women’s cooperative work to support a community through the toughest of times.The Dakar-based West Africa team of photographer Leo Correa, correspondent Carley Petesch and senior producer Yesica Fisch initially spent weeks working tirelessly to make contacts and gain the trust of the women as they waited for the fishing season to finally begin. Their reporting let the women's voices tell their story — and the visuals put you on the beach as they work laying out the catch, smoking the fish under smoldering peanut shells.Deep storytelling like this also took a team of editors and producers to make the work sing. Digital storytelling producer Nat Castañeda, deputy news director/U.S. South Janelle Cogan, Beirut-based producer Hend Kortam and chief photographer/Africa Jerome Delay collaborated across continents and were essential to the success of the package, delivering video edits, photo galleries, digital production and text tailored to meet client needs.Major European client France24's Journal d'Afrique editor wrote: “The visuals of the Senegal story are among the best I’ve seen in recent years from one of the main agencies.”https://aplink.news/h5bhttps://aplink.photos/4zohttps://aplink.video/gj1
for securing a rare, all-formats interview with Montenegro's long-time leader Milo Djukanovic at the time when his 30-year-rule is being most seriously threatened by massive street protests. The pro-Western president has defied Russia to steer his small country into NATO, warning that the integration of the Western Balkans into the European Union is crucial for the bloc to protect itself from growing Russian and Chinese influence in the region.https://bit.ly/2UtHNjHhttps://bit.ly/2WPVZ2Q
for their work that allowed AP to break news and dominate coverage with its rapid, all-format coverage of the shooting deaths of five people in Louisiana – including the first interview with a family member of the dead, Facebook postings from the shooter, and an all-formats interview with two people who lived with two of those killed. https://bit.ly/2BamasD
In Chad to cover the sudden death of the country’s longtime president, the AP team of West Africa Bureau Chief Krista Larson, Nigeria-based video journalist Lekan Oyekanmi and photographer Sunday Alamba decided to look at the COVID situation in a country that has yet to administer its first shot. Political unrest made the assignment far more challenging, with police on the hunt for journalists. Alamba and Oyekanmi had already been detained for eight hours and warned not to venture out into the street again.
After days of prodding, the team was granted just a brief interview with medical staff in a hospital conference room. But the all-formats crew pressed the case to see the COVID ward for themselves, eventually winning access. Accounts of bravery and deprivation among overwhelmed medical staff, and the images shot by Alamba and Oyekanmi, speak volumes, highlighting a deep global inequity despite promises by wealthy nations to help vaccinate the world.
For intrepid coverage in the harshest of reporting environments, Larson, Alamba and Oyekanmi win AP’s Best of the Week award.
