for acting on a tip gleaned from a routine source meeting to report the “Hidden Figures” story of how black women have quietly built a nationally competitive physics program at historically black Dillard University. http://apne.ws/2rpPnfW
Sarah Rankin and Steve Helber were covering a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia when chaos broke out. The marchers and counter protesters – Rankin’s words – ‘’threw punches, screamed, set off smoke bombs. They hurled water bottles, balloons of paint, containers full of urine. They unleashed chemical sprays. Some waved Confederate flags. Others burned them.’’
Rankin and Helber were the first of many AP colleagues to cover the story, and their initial work paid off in significant ways.
"They kept us as slaves."
One man's tearful revelation to AP national investigative reporter Mitch Weiss helped unravel a horrible secret – the former congregant of the World of Faith Fellowship sect was among hundreds who'd been dispatched from the church's two Brazilian branches to the U.S., where many say they were forced to work for little or no pay and physically or verbally assaulted.
Dozens of former congregants told similar stories of abuse and exploitation in an exclusive AP multi-format story that earns Weiss, national investigative reporter Holbrook Mohr, and Peter Prengaman, news director in Rio de Janeiro, the Beat of the Week.
for being first to confirm fatalities and their nationalities after an earthquake struck parts of Greece and Turkey. The team also packaged fresh and user-generated video that was used widely. http://bit.ly/2uVoZw0
for keeping AP ahead over five furious days with details about the resolution of the state budget deadlock in Illinois, the nation’s longest since the Great Depression. http://abcn.ws/2ufuOBh
for breaking major developments in the Senate Republicans’ struggles to get a health care bill, from the first word of the Congressional Budget Office’s report that 22 million would be uninsured under the bill, to a key senator’s defection, to plans to delay a vote until after the July 4th recess. http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-pol...
Colleen Long was by herself on the New York City desk this past Sunday with plenty to do, including taking feeds from two different stringers to update national stories on gay pride parades and a graduation at a suburban high school shattered by killings blamed on the violent MS-13 gang.
But she still managed to jump into action on what turned out to be one of the day’s most clickable stories – of a teenager who dangled and then fell 25 feet from a gondola ride at an upstate New York amusement park.
Not only did Long land an interview with a father and daughter who scrambled to safely catch the 14-year-old girl, she also got the man to send in video that a friend took of the entire event, a reporting tour de force that singlehandedly put the AP out front across all formats.
For doggedly working a story from the desk to keep the AP competitive, Colleen Long wins this week’s Best of the States Award.
for landing a scoop about an effort by a broad group including the 28-nation European Union, the United States, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Israel and four other countries to pressure China to scale back plans for intensive inspections of imports that they say would hamper access to its fast-growing market. http://on-ajc.com/2skMfTt
for scoring the first national interview with Montana’s incoming congressman, Republican Greg Gianforte, who had pleaded guilty to assaulting a reporter during the campaign. He called for civility in politics. http://bit.ly/2s1i3rB
for an enterprise project that accurately anticipated a major change in the nation's school choice movement; two weeks later, it happened after President Donald Trump released his federal budget proposal. http://apne.ws/2rRCEzH http://bit.ly/2qyGYmi
for digging into campaign finance records to reveal how the liquor industry contributes to powerful politicians in the state, who in turn protect an arcane system of laws about who can sell beer and even how cold or warm it is. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/mid...
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
for breaking the news that national TV basketball analyst Holly Rowe’s cancer had returned. http://apne.ws/2rATJRa
for an exclusive report showing that an Indianapolis suburb has paid an influential congressman's wife $580,000 since 2015 for legal consulting she largely does from the Washington area, an unusually large sum. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/mid...
for breaking the news that Iraq and the U.S. are in talks over keeping American troops in Iraq for the long term after the Islamic State group is defeated. http://apne.ws/2p9DuW3
The email to AP confided: “Up until reading your article I believed that my daughter's assault was an anomaly. It's not something that is talked about. School officials must take immediate and proactive steps to protect students from being assaulted on school grounds. The first step is to bring it out in the open.”
The anguished mother was responding to the first installment of an Associated Press series running through May exploring the untold story of student-on-student sexual assaults, not on college campuses but in U.S. elementary and secondary schools. The result of a yearlong investigation, the expose by Emily Schmall, Reese Dunklin, Robin McDowell and Justin Pritchard earns the Beat of the Week.
The last of four executions carried out by Arkansas in April highlighted concerns about the drug midazolam. The sedative has been adopted by many states in recent years as part of their lethal injection protocol in place of barbiturates and anesthetics no longer available because manufacturers don't want them used in executions.
How did that midazolam execution compare to others, some in other states, where problems were alleged?
It was a question the AP – with its nationwide profile – was uniquely positioned to answer. For its depth of coverage, the multi-state AP team wins this week's Best of States award.
for detailing a devastating but little-known outgrowth of the housing crisis: Deed-theft scams that trick mostly elderly and vulnerable people into signing over title to their homes, typically in gentrifying areas, leaving them homeless or facing years of legal wrangling to undo the fraud. http://apne.ws/2oERZ4U
for an AP investigation that for the first time brought to light a series of questionable decisions that nearly brought disaster to California communities downstream of the nation's tallest dam. https://apnews.com/0a4b46c359444c58918ad374f7cd3d2...
for a widely played second installment of the series, Trump Country. The AP journalists got the people of Androscoggin County, Maine, a community revived by refugees, to open up about the anti-immigrant fervor that helped elect Donald Trump, who carried the county. https://apnews.com/7f2b534b80674596875980b9b6e701c...