Best of the AP

Best of the Week - First Winner April 05, 2024

AP team jumps into action to lead the pack on stunning Baltimore bridge collapse

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When the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in the middle of the night, AP staff from Bangkok to Baltimore contributed to all-formats reporting over a vast spectrum of spot and investigative angles.

It was just a bit after 3 a.m. when Baltimore reporter Lea Skene learned the Francis Scott Key Bridge had just crumpled into the river below.

Skene sprang into action and got a key fire department official on the phone. That allowed the AP to quickly give accurate details and avoid inflating the numbers of people missing, like other outlets did. Soon a team of AP reporters, photographers and video journalists joined to deliver coverage that earned huge play in newspapers around the world.

Annapolis reporter Brian Witte joined Skene on the ground and scored early-morning interviews with the governor and the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. Video journalists Nathan Ellgren and Rick Gentilo provided coverage that was the most downloaded among customers globally for the week, particularly their early shots. Photographers Mark Schiefelbein and Matt Rourke delivered images of the crumpled bridge and of locals discussing how the collapse challenged Baltimore’s identity as a port city.

For delivering an encompassing and engrossing look at how the collapse of a bridge scarred a city’s psyche and uncovered potential trade-offs when it comes to safety, Skene, Witte, Schiefelbein, Rourke, Ellgren, Gentilo and the Baltimore Bridge Collapse Team are this week’s Best of the Week — First Winner.

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Best of the Week - Second Winner April 05, 2024

AP unfurls long-in-the-works investigation into ‘lethal restraint’ by police

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AP compiled and shared the most comprehensive database on a topic of deep national interest, deaths during police restraint, and told engaging stories to illustrate the disturbing trends.

It all began three years ago, born from a call for global investigation proposals of the highest ambition. Along the way, the project picked up several dozen AP journalists across a wide footprint, dozens of students from two journalism schools and PBS’ “Frontline.” Just take a glance at the credits page, which lists around 180 names across organizations. The result was “Lethal Restraint,” a collaborative investigation that used 7,000 public records act requests to document more than 1,000 deaths stemming from police using “less-lethal force” over the course of a decade.

Reporters gathered hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of police video. Tracking and analyzing all the information required entirely new project management tools. Reporters logged tens of thousands of data points using the documents and video, much of it exclusive. Fact checkers vetted every footnote before AP shared the database publicly, via an interactive presentation site of uncommon sophistication and quality.

The reporting was unrivaled on a topic of huge national interest. While media have tracked police shootings and private groups have tracked police killings overall, no one has focused both so deeply and so broadly on deaths that didn’t involve a firearm — deaths that can be easier to explain away.

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