The Northern Wyoming News won several awards over the weekend, which is exciting to our staff but should also be exciting to you, our readers.

Your Northern Wyoming News, which was originally started as the weekly Worland Grit in 1905, then the daily Northern Wyoming Daily News in 1939 and back to a weekly as the Northern Wyoming News, in 2019, is striving every week to bring you a quality product filled with strong news, features, sports stories and opinion. This past weekend our peers in the industry judged us and found that to be true based on our awards.

We are able to provide a quality product to our readers each week thanks to our advertisers who see the value of advertising in the Northern Wyoming News.

Our graphic designer, who is also our production manager, Jane Gates, swept the merchandise ad category with a first- and second-place design. That means for our advertisers, you have an award-winning designer who handles your marketing needs in our print production.

Our sports editor Alex Kuhn took home second place in sports column. He provides a lot of insight on a variety of sports topics throughout the year — college, professional and local — and along the way he shares a little of himself to our readers.

Our former staff reporter Avery Howe, who moved up north to Montana, earned a first place for a feature story, first place for a photo and a second place for a feature story.

Yours truly, took second in the news story category for a package of articles centering on the search for Breanna Mitchell.

These awards show that we have quality writers and reporters on staff to bring you a variety of news, filling these pages week in and week out.

We work hard each week to come up with stories that we believe are relevant and important to our community and that our readers should know about.

Our tourism guide, The Basin, which was started in 2016, earned second-place honors as a special section. This magazine highlights information from around the Basin for visitors to the area, whether they come as tourists, for meetings or sporting events. We feel this magazine is a strong product to showcase all that is special about our Big Horn Basin. The judges felt that way as well.

For the second time in three years, the Northern Wyoming News earned the prestigious and humbling honor of Editorial Excellence. This category involves the editorials in this space written by yours truly. However, I feel as if it is a staff award as often I get my topics from members of the staff or from the stories that they write. They will suggest topics and a couple members of the Northern Wyoming News staff will read it through and let me know if I’m off base or not. I value their opinion and trust they will be honest with me.

But, of all the awards and accolades our staff received over the weekend at the 125th Wyoming Press Association Winter Convention in Casper, the biggest accolades come from you, our readers. We appreciate you taking the time each week to read our stories, our thoughts and opinions. We are thankful that you continue to support us and support our advertisers through purchasing the newspaper off the newsstands or purchasing (or renewing) your subscription (and by the reaction to our New Year’s subscription special our readers also understand the value of a good deal).

Rest assured that just because we won some awards for our work in 2023, we will not rest on our laurels. We will continue to work to improve ourselves and our product for you.

We welcome suggested story ideas. In fact, we received two story ideas this week, one we were able to jump on right away and the other is a feature idea that will take some time and some research that we hope to bring to you in our annual Big Horn Basin Edition this summer.

So thank you to our readers, for without you, these awards would not be possible and would not mean as much.