Best of AP — Honorable Mention

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Do you understand how to speak Gen Alpha? Thanks to AP, now you can!

FILE - Second-grade student Jose Byrd (black t-shirt with sun) and classmates try out eclipse viewing glasses that they decorated at Riverside Elementary School in Cleveland, Ohio, March 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Carolyn Thompson, File)

Tween Slang Quiz

Last week, several news outlets did stories on Gen Alpha slang. Most, if not all, of them took a text-based approach, but at the AP, where we are pushing ourselves to try new storytelling forms, the team behind the quiz — Ed Medeles, Emily Olson and Caleb Diehl — took a different approach:

Report out the story but present the result in a way that makes it much more interactive.

They wanted the audiences to have fun and learn at the same time.

The quiz also benefitted from creative and colorful word cloud images created by Eva Malek.

The companion piece — a digital video — also took an equally playful approach: Quizzing AP staffers, of all ages, on their knowledge of teen slangs. The video was shot by Nandini Gupta and starred Ed Medeles, and then Akira Olivia Kumamoto got the edit just right to make sure it hit the mark.

Content that pulls back the curtain tends to resonate well — and this was no exception.

“Appreciate the levity in these dark back to school day,” said one user. “[M]y students just asked me what these exact words mean yesterday at the end of class!! Now I got them!”

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