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
for reporting on a North Dakota county that appeared set to become the first in the U.S. to vote against taking any new refugees after President Donald Trump issued an executive order giving them the power to do so. https://bit.ly/2ExyG6Z
for a package that demonstrated how the vast majority of violent crime laws named for victims carry the names of white victims. With no databases available, Smyth did painstaking research with the help of other statehouse reporters, and the team reported a powerful story about one black middle-school student who was murdered, but for whom no law is named. https://bit.ly/34h6WOzhttps://bit.ly/2siKNCb
Jolted out of bed by the 6.4-magnitude earthquake just before 4 a.m., correspondent Llazar Semini in Tirana knew immediately he was dealing with a major story. Communications networks were shaky, but he managed to reach colleagues in other formats by phone, triggering what would become a virtual sweep of the disaster coverage.
The quick decisions made in the early hours resulted in a compelling all-formats report and gave AP the clear advantage over competitive agencies. Nowhere was that advantage more evident than in live video – AP picked up live video within an hour of the quake, and several hours before any of the competition.
Coverage was just as impressive in text, photo and video edits. AP’s dominance continued with drone video, and all-formats coverage of dramatic rescue efforts and anguished survivors.
For resourceful work that powerfully conveyed the human toll and devastation while delivering a dominant competitive performance, the multinational all-formats team of Llazar Semini, Visar Kryeziu, Hektor Pustina, Amer Cohadzic, Erion Xhiabati, Florent Bajrami, Sylejman Klokkoqi and Petros Giannakouris shares AP’s Best of the Week.
In addressing its clergy sex abuse crisis, the Catholic church has touted a key reform: independent review boards with lay people.
But an exhaustive investigation by the AP team of Reese Dunklin, Matt Sedensky and Mitch Weiss methodically discredited that claim.
The reporters unearthed dozens of cases nationwide in which review boards rejected complaints from survivors, only to have them later validated by secular authorities. They also found that bishops stacked the boards with their own aides and attorneys. In a few cases, board members were themselves clergy accused of sexual misconduct.
The rock-solid reporting was brought alive by the storytelling, with revealing details down to the pink sweater one board member was knitting while listening to a survivor’s story of abuse.
For their comprehensive investigation into the Catholic church’s deeply flawed system for addressing claims of abuse, Dunklin, Sedensky and Weiss earn this week’s Best of the States award.
Kamil Zihnioglu has seen lots of protests while working as a photo stringer for The Associated Press in Paris, but these campaigns were different, focused on a dark, unreconstructed side of an otherwise progressive France.
Every time a woman is killed by her partner, hundreds of activists take to the streets under cover of night to plaster signs decrying the deaths and pleading for government action.
But Zihnioglu wanted to tell the story behind the protests. He spent weeks gaining the activists’ trust, and he teamed up with visiting video journalist Mstyslav Chernov to tell their story. Meanwhile, reporter Claire Parker and the Paris video team of Catherine Gaschka and Oleg Cetinic produced a powerful all-format package digging into deadly domestic violence in France.
For bringing attention to an issue that is often ignored, Kamil Zihnioglu, Claire Parker, Mystslav Chernov, Catherine Gaschka and Oleg Cetinic win AP’s Best of the Week.
for shedding light on the Census Bureau’s policy of counting inmates as residents of the prison where they are held, rather than where they are actually from. Critics call it prison gerrymandering, arguing that it unfairly shifts political power and resources from urban, liberal, largely minority areas to rural, white, largely conservative areas. http://bit.ly/3562l2q
The death of the Islamic State group “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was one of the most competitive stories in the world in recent weeks. Journalists scrambled to uncover details of the U.S. operation and how the Islamic State leader ended up in a hideout in Syria.
Beirut-based Middle East reporter Sarah El Deeb put the AP out front with a story based on exclusive interviews recounting al-Baghdadi’s final days, as he was shuttled furtively around Syria by a dwindling circle of confidants.
Enhancing the narrative were dramatic details from a teenage girl who had been enslaved by al-Baghdadi as he sought refuge. El Deeb elicited the previously untold details through sensitive and dogged reporting.
The story stood out from the many accounts that simply echoed the official account of al-Baghdadi’s death, demonstrating not only the AP’s dominance on a global story but also its trusted ability to provide facts-based reporting from the ground in the region.
For outstanding source work and reporting on a story of intense interest, Sarah El Deeb wins AP’s Best of the Week award.
When two burning tree limbs crashed in flames on the exact spot where Marcio Sanchez had been standing just moments earlier, the shaken AP Los Angeles photographer called two colleagues to check that they both had his wife’s phone number, figuring that “if something happened to me, they could tell her.” He then plunged back to work, capturing vivid images of the furious wildfires tearing across swaths of California.
That incident captured the commitment of AP journalists during a frenetic week documenting the wind-whipped wildfires and accompanying blackouts. Sanchez was joined in the riveting coverage by photographers Noah Berger and Greg Bull, reporters Janie Har and Don Thompson, and more than a dozen others on the ground and in AP bureaus.
The engrossing, all-formats coverage was among the most popular on AP all week.
For their extraordinary work during a hectic and dangerous week, Sanchez, Berger, Bull, Thompson and Har share AP’s Best of the Week.
Coal-burning generating plants are closing in the U.S., and coal mines are shutting down amid worries of climate change and the new economies of renewable energy.
Against that backdrop, correspondents Felicia Fonseca and Susan Montoya Bryan traveled to Arizona’s remote Navajo Generating Station to the tell the story of workers, their families, a community and the tribal nations who have depended on coal and are feeling the profound effects of the plant’s impending closure.
In their all-formats package, the pair let workers explain what they were losing, and how the local economy is taking a massive hit with millions of dollars of revenue no longer flowing to the Hopi and Navajo tribes.
For a comprehensive, compelling look at the impact of coal’s decline on a community and a culture, Fonseca and Montoya earn this week’s Best of the States award.
Knowledge of clergy sex abuse is widespread on the mainland of the United States. But it has long been a secret in the small, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic U.S. territory of Guam.
Washington-based investigative reporter Michael Biesecker, working with Atlanta-based enterprise photographer David Goldman and Seattle video journalist Manuel Valdes, helped to puncture that veil of silence when AP examined thousands of pages of court documents in lawsuits brought by abuse victims and then conducted extensive interviews.
The AP team detailed a pattern of repeated collusion among predator priests, with abuse that spanned generations and reached all the way to the top of the territory’s church hierarchy, ruled over by then-Archbishop Tony Apuron, who himself had been accused of the rape of a 13-year-old choir boy when Apuron was a parish priest.
The care and sensitivity of the reporting and images were essential to the project’s power. “To see my story told in this way gives me a lot of peace, that I have a purpose,” said Walter Denton, a former U.S. Army sergeant and survivor of abuse nearly 40 years ago.
For telling a sensitive and little-known story of systemic clerical abuse dating from the 1950s to as recently as 2013, Biesecker, Goldman and Valdes share AP’s Best of the Week award.
for delivering compelling photos and key story elements from Nagano, ground zero following Typhoon Hagibis, one of Japan’s worst typhoons in memory. Hong’s photos depicting victims coping with mass destruction in the storm’s wake dominated international play online and in print, including the front page of The Japan Times.https://bit.ly/2Pi6USKhttps://bit.ly/31I0EGq
for overcoming major obstacles to cover Turkey’s offensive into northern Syria, including disruptions of communications networks, hostility to international media and sporadic shelling. The pair provided powerful visual coverage of the military buildup on the Turkish side of the border, early scenes of troops crossing into Syria and a live shot of the border and the chaotic scene of a mortar attack in the Turkish town of Akcakale. Strong contributions from Beirut rounded out the coverage.https://bit.ly/33ehnCehttps://bit.ly/2MRpii9https://bit.ly/2nZnH1y
for following up on an offhand remark by an Ivy League fundraiser to document how the Sackler family, behind the powerfully addictive opioid OxyContin, gave money to colleges and universities on a much larger scale than previously known: at least $60 million to prestigious schools worldwide – including millions donated after the company became embroiled in lawsuits related to the opioid epidemic. https://bit.ly/2AGZ78o
In western Alaska, rape survivors and their supporters say Nome’s police department has often failed to investigate sexual assaults, especially when the victims are Alaska Native women.
Delivering sensitive-but-powerful coverage from a challenging environment, enterprise photographer Maye-E Wong and freelance correspondent Victoria Mckenzie tell the story of average Americans struggling with sexual violence and law enforcement in small communities. Their work made clear that Nome’s struggles don’t represent an isolated case; it is a microcosm of how police and towns and cities across the U.S. have failed survivors of sexual assaults.
For going to extremes – literally and figuratively – to shed light on a remote corner of the larger issue of sexual violence and enforcement, Wong and Mckenzie share this week’s Best of the States award.
They are crises that have received significant attention while playing out in different parts of the world, but the efforts of a trio of AP journalists have shed new light on both the perilous journey of migrants in the Mediterranean and the opioid epidemic in America.
The work of the journalists, Renata Brito aboard the Ocean Viking humanitarian ship sailing in the Mediterranean Sea, and Lindsay Whitehurst and Claire Galofaro in the U.S., tells the respective stories with a captivating clarity that resonated with readers and earned a rare tie in the Best of the Week contest. Each story demonstrated the profound storytelling power the AP can bring to complex stories with ingenuity, smart planning and teamwork.
Barcelona-based Brito wins for a story that she’s still living, and telling, from the Ocean Viking. Embedded with a ship that last week rescued 50 migrants fleeing violence in Africa, her dispatch, “Migrant escaping Libya torture: We will go to Europe or die,” showed in stark terms the journey that for many has ended in death.
Galofaro and Whitehurst, meanwhile, share the win with a very different but no-less-gripping tale: “The rise and fall of an Eagle Scout’s deadly fentanyl empire,” about a millennial who built a million-dollar empire of mail-order fentanyl-laced pills.
For packages that brought new insight and perspective to heavily covered stories with significant global impact, Brito, Galofaro and Whitehurst win AP’s Best of the Week honors.
for a collaborative effort that produced outstanding images and powerful storytelling surrounding Robert Mugabe’s death, and explored the hardships of the people he left in economic crisis.
The distinctive work done by AP’s all-formats team in Zimbabwe was due in large part to the efforts of photographer Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi. His tireless negotiations with Zimbwabwean authorities over the preceding months meant AP staffers were already accredited to work in the country and could fly into Harare soon after news broke of Mugabe’s death. AP was reporting the story while other news organisations struggled to get into the country.
Mukwazhi’s persistent face-to-face contact with the information ministry was also crucial for obtaining press accreditation for Johannesburg-based Africa News Editor Andy Meldrum, AP’s foremost expert on Zimbabwe, who had been on a blacklist for 16 years for his reporting on Mugabe’s rule. Meldrum’s personal reporting from the ground defined AP’s coverage, while photo, video and text colleagues delivered comprehensive coverage ranging from the official funeral ceremonies to the daily life of Zimbabeans struggling to get by.https://bit.ly/2m2Hlbphttps://bit.ly/2m0JODehttps://apnews.com/RobertMugabe
Through smart planning, speed and considerable courage, the AP managed to be the only agency on the ground Sept. 1 as Hurricane Dorian, a powerful Category 5 storm, arrived and parked itself over the Bahamas for more than 24 hours dumping tons of water and packing sustained winds in excess of 185 MPH. Not even local broadcasters, including the government channel, were able to feed live images.
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-09-01/northern-bahamas-hunkers-down-as-hurricane-dorian-closes-in
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.
As allegations of sexual abuse by clergy have proliferated across the Catholic Church, millions of dollars in settlement money has been paid to victims. Some have received as much as $500,000 apiece.
Not La Jarvis D. Love.
At an IHOP in the Mississippi Delta, a white official from the Franciscan religious order offered to pay him just $15,000 to keep years of alleged abuse secret.
“He said if I wanted more, I would have to get a lawyer and have my lawyer call his lawyer,” Love told The Associated Press. “Well, we don’t have lawyers. We felt like we had to take what we could.”
The story, the latest in AP’s investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church, revealed deals struck with two black men for abuse they said happened in grade school that represent far lower amounts than what other clergy abuse survivors have received. It also revealed the men had been asked to sign nondisclosure agreements, which had long been banned by U.S. Catholic leaders.
Despite the challenges, the team – investigative reporter Mike Rezendes, photographer Maye-E-Wong, video journalist Sarah Blake Morgan, digital storytelling producer Samantha Shotzbarger and researcher Randy Herschaft – produced extraordinary work. Herschaft discovered several critical threads that showed an alleged abuser was working with children even after the church had known about one of the men’s allegations.
For their sensitive work on a complex, emotional and previously untold story, the team of Rezendes, Morgan, Wong, Shotzbarger and Herschaft win this week’s Best of the States.
