The Daily Inter Lake achieved its best showing ever at the Montana Newspaper Association’s annual awards banquet Saturday night, claiming 19 total awards and seven first-places.

“This is a truly gratifying result,” Managing Editor Frank Miele said. “We were particularly pleased that we got so many awards on the same day our former publisher, Tom Kurdy, was honored by the newspaper association with its Master Editor-Publisher award. It made the day extra special.”

Current Inter Lake publisher Rick Weaver presented the award to Kurdy at a luncheon presentation and was on hand with Miele to collect the Inter Lake’s awards at the evening ceremony. Both events were part of the newspaper association’s annual convention, which was held this year at Big Sky.

“Most exciting for me as editor was learning that 13 different people on our staff won awards in different categories, plus general excellence awards that went to our sports staff, our advertising staff and the newspaper as a whole,” Miele said. “The strength of our reporting and writing also led to a number of first-place awards, more than ever before.”

Miele won first place in “serious column writing” for his “Editor’s 2 Cents” column, including one submission that was hailed as “a great tribute to newspaper as lifeblood of community.” The managing editor also received a third-place award for “general writing excellence” for another selection of columns, which were noted by the judge as a “nice mix of humor, emotion and straight-forward talk.”

The best individual performance by an Inter Lake staffer in this year’s contest was turned in by Features Editor Lynnette Hintze, who shared a first-place award in the “lifestyle” category with reporter Tom Lotshaw and the rest of the staff for a series of stories on the Eastern Montana and North Dakota oil boom.

Hintze also won three other individual awards.

Hintze placed second for “best humorous column,” with the judge noting that “Lynnette shows a knack for sharing life’s lessons in a way that readers can easily relate to.” She also took third place in best “agriculture issues reporting” for her story about a grape-growing initiative and honorable mention for general writing excellence.

Other awards in the newsroom were:

v Reporter Jesse Davis won first place in the highly contested category of “best in-depth investigative reporting” for his series of stories on the assault on a bus filled with high-school freshman football players. The contest judge remarked that Davis’s reporting was a “newsy, compelling story, well-told, and investigated by the reporter to spur action by the school system.”

v In another hotly contested category, former Inter Lake reporter Eric Schwartz won first place in spot-news reporting for the second year in a row. This year he won for his emotion-packed story about the sentencing of Justine Winter for the deaths of a mother and son when Winter crashed her car into them in an apparent suicide attempt.  

v County reporter Shelley Ridenour won a first-place award for her series of stories on retraining in a bad economy. Judges noted that the series would “touch many in these tough economic times” and complimented Ridenour for putting “a human face on the issue.”

v Natural resources reporter Jim Mann shared a third place award with other staff members for “best outdoor pages,” and he also won third place for “best editorial writing” for his role as a member of the Inter Lake editorial board. Mann’s editorials were praised as “authoritatively written” and “convincing.”

v Assistant Managing Editor Scott Crandell, who is heavily involved in designing the newspaper on a daily basis, won third place for “best headline writing.”

v Features reporter Candace Chase won an honorable mention for health and medical science reporting for a collection of stories including one about a “bionic” hand and one about fibromyalgia.

v Former Inter Lake photographer Nate Chute won an honorable mention for his photo essay about the local home-school basketball team.

v The sports staff shared an honorable mention award for best sports pages, including special mention of superior use of photography.

v The Inter Lake also won honorable mention for general excellence overall among large newspapers, surpassed among dailies in that category only by the Billings Gazette and the Missoulian.

The advertising staff also received several prestigious awards:

D.J. Lopez won first place for best black and white ad for her “Parenting” ad for the Nurturing Center. Kori Valentine and Julie Hindahl shared a first-place award for best advertising series for a 1950s photo campaign to promote the Toggery.

The Inter Lake also won second place in “general excellence advertising” and was praised for “a high level of creativity throughout” and generally “forceful advertising layout.”

The Daily Inter Lake’s previous best showing in the Better Newspaper Contest was in 2002, when the banquet was held in Kalispell. That year the newspaper won 18 awards, including five for first place.

Other newspapers in the Hagadone Montana News Network also received awards Saturday, led by the Lake County Leader in Polson with 24.

The Whitefish Pilot was close behind with 18 awards, followed by the Hungry Horse News with eight, Clark Fork Valley Press with four, and the Bigfork Eagle with three.