Taking a bow …

I
t is not going to come as a surprise to many of our readers that the News Letter Journal brought home another impressive stack of hardware from this year’s Wyoming Press Association Annual Convention last weekend.
Alexis Barker, Amy Menerey, Sonja Karp, KateLynn Slaamot and Walter Sprague all claimed state awards to maintain the NLJ’s place as one of Wyoming’s top community newspapers, and Amy and Alexis cemented their own positions among the state’s elite journalists by claiming multiple awards. Our summer intern, Braden Schiller, won a photography award as well. (He’s now a reporter at the Powell Tribune, and produced one of the Wyoming News Exchange stories we featured in last week’s NEWC Now, our email newsletter).
The newspaper again won awards as a staff, and we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that every award — regardless of who’s name is on it — is the result of the hard work and collaboration of everybody who works at the News Letter Journal. 
We are fortunate to work with such a talented and committed group of individuals, and the community is blessed by their professionalism and ability to deliver an informative and entertaining product week after week.
Of course, we all know we are just as lucky to be able to tell the stories of such a fantastic community, and we thank you again for continuing to let us do so every year. We were proud to share those stories with the rest of the state last week, and humbled by the praise everyone received.
We were also inspired by the work of Wyoming’s other great journalists, and motivated by the excellence demonstrated by our colleagues at other newspapers. 
We return from the convention each year fired up to produce more award-winning content in the months to come, and armed with the valuable training and education we receive at the annual event, we are excited to say that even better newspapers (and websites and newsletters and podcasts, etc.) will indeed be coming your way!
If you want to see some of the great work being done by other newspapers around Wyoming, go to the Wyoming Press Association website, wyopress.org, for a full rundown of the awards presented last week. There really was some incredible stuff produced by the state’s journalists, and looking at their work was a pretty neat way to look back at 2021 in Wyoming.