The Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association handed out awards last week in its 2023 Better Newspaper Contest, and I’m pleased to announce that the Chieftain’s news staff won a half-dozen awards, including three first-place citations.

Of course, Chieftain staff members don’t do their work with an eye toward winning awards; our first obligation is to serve our readers.

Still, there’s no denying that awards are nice — and it’s also nice that the accolades came from other working journalists. (Each year, journalists from different states judge the contest; this year’s Oregon contest was judged by members of the Texas Press Association. The Chieftain competed against newspapers of generally the same size in terms of circulation.)

Here’s a quick rundown of the awards the Chieftain collected this year.

• The 2022 edition of our Wallowa County Visitors’ Guide, produced by a team of staff members and freelance writers, won a first-place award for best special section.

• Reporter Bill Bradshaw won a first-place award in general feature writing for his story about a crew of firefighters, all of whom had military backgrounds. The Umatilla-based crew was in Wallowa County last summer fighting wildfires.

• Bradshaw also collected a second-place award in the same category, general feature writing, for a story about Haunt Camp and its work to create a haunted cheesecake restaurant for Halloween.

• Bradshaw picked up another second-place award — this one for coverage of business and economic issues — for a story about an onslaught of armyworms that attacked area farms last year.

• And Bradshaw earned a third-place award in the spot-news category for his coverage of 2023’s wildfires.

• Andy Nicolais, the wonderful designer who lays out most editions of the Chieftain, won a first-place award for best front page for a spectacular layout of a feature story about avalanches. (Nicolais won a similar award for best front page for the East Oregonian, another paper owned by EO Media Group; that layout also featured the same avalanche story. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not true — Nicolais designed two different layouts built around the same story. Both pages looked fantastic.)

Speaking of awardsCongratulations to Joseph Charter School kindergarten teacher Alyse Shetler, who recently was named one of 17 Regional Teachers of the Year in Oregon. Shetler has been a teacher for 15 years; 13 of them have been at Joseph.

Because we hear so much troubling news about the state of public education nationally, it can be much too easy to forget that there are teachers like Shetler in every school in the state — dedicated, hard-working, creative, energetic.

Lance Homan, the superintendent of Joseph Charter School, nominated Shetler for the award. “She’s a one-of-a-kind, genuine, caring teacher who genuinely loves everyone,” he said.

Shetler herself defined her teaching philosophy in a letter of application for the award: “Create, collaborate and imagine describes my method of how kids learn, how teachers should teach, and how relationships grow,” she wrote.

That sounds like a winning combination — and the judges of the contest obviously agreed.

Shetler now has a shot at earning the title of Oregon Teacher of the Year; the winner of that award will be announced later this month. But regardless of who claims the state title, it’s clear that Shetler’s students over the years are among the big winners.