03/03/08

AP Press Release

Ted Bridis named editor of AP's Multimedia Investigative Team

NEW YORK -- Ted Bridis has been named editor of the AP's Multimedia Investigative Team in Washington. He has been acting editor of the investigative team since January 2007, directing exclusive enterprise journalism across print, broadcast and Internet formats at The Associated Press.

The appointment was announced March 3 by Washington bureau chief Sandy Johnson.

Under Bridis, the investigative team uncovered the Bush administration's efforts to keep secret an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems occur more frequently than previously recognized. It also examined the nation's runaway use of prescription painkillers, and the rising number of accidents inside U.S. laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins. The team's coverage of lax U.S. oversight of sales of surplus military equipment resulted in the "Stop Arming Iran Act," a federal law President Bush signed in January that prohibits the Pentagon from selling leftover F-14 fighter jet parts.

As one of the AP's investigative reporters, Bridis was first to describe security concerns over plans by the United Arab Emirates to take over significant operations at U.S. seaports, a deal abandoned amid public and congressional pressure. He also disclosed practices by federal and local police across the U.S. to gather phone records from private data brokers without subpoenas or warrants, and was first to report hacker break-ins at the State Department so serious it severed all its Internet connections across East Asia for weeks.

Bridis joined the AP in 1989 in Oklahoma after graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He was named correspondent in Evansville, Ind., in 1995 and went to Washington in 1998 as the AP's technology reporter, covering the Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial. After a brief stint at the Wall Street Journal, Bridis returned to the AP's Washington bureau in November 2001.

Bridis has twice won the AP Managing Editors' National Enterprise award, and won the AP's prestigious Gramling journalism award in 2004 for "putting the news service ahead on a wide range of major breaking stories with a blend of source reporting, technology and strategic thinking."

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