CHARLESTON — The Intelligencer and Wheeling News-Register captured 15 awards Saturday during the 2018 West Virginia Press Association Better Newspapers Contest, held at the Embassy Suites in Charleston.

The awards honored editorial and advertising work done in 2017. The newspapers compete in Division I with the state’s large dailies.

The newspapers earned three first-place awards, six second-place awards and six third-place awards.

First-place honors came for Best Sports Special Section for the 2017 annual football publication, which highlighted our “Gridiron Greats.” The section, which marked 50 years in 2017, featured a top player from each of the past five decades on the cover, along with the Ohio Valley’s 50 best players of the past 50 years and also an All 50-year team.

Another first-place award went to sportswriter Shawn Rine as the state’s best sports columnist. In 2017, Rine tackled a number of important sports topics, but the three submitted as the winning entries focused on the unexpected departure last year of West Liberty University men’s basketball coach Jim Crutchfield; how high school transfers are handled, and the fixation among some parents that their child play for a certain high school sports team; and how the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference needs to overhaul a rule for the annual Rudy Mumley All-Star football game that limited players from being able to participate in American Legion baseball and play in the football game.

Here’s what the judges had to say about Rine’s entries: “All three of Mr. Rine’s entries were interesting and presented a clear stance on an issue or story of local importance. Whereas some of the other entries in this category read more like regular sports stories, Mr. Rine’s entries all had elements of first-person writing. I thought the topics chosen for these columns were a little more original than those of the second-place submission, which was the main criteria for distinguishing between the two.”

Staff writers Dave Gossett and Mark Law received the final first-place award in the Best Coverage of Breaking News category for his coverage of the 2017 ambush shooting of Jefferson County Judge Joseph Bruzzese. Gossett and Law wrote a series of compelling articles that detailed events as they happened the day of the shooting and then followed up with stories on Bruzzese’s recovery, a profile of the man who shot him and how the shooting impacted court employees.

Second place came in the following categories:

– Best single issue, Dec. 3, 2017, which featured Wheeling Central Catholic High School and Steubenville High School winning state championships along with stories on the natural gas industry and others;

– Best lifestyles columnist, Heather Ziegler;

– Best legal affairs reporter, Janet Metzner, for her coverage of the Budget Finance scandal;

– Best classified display advertisement;

– Best full-page advertising campaign;

– Best spot color advertisement, half page or less.

Third-place awards were in the following categories:

– Best agency advertisement;

– Best house advertisement;

– Best recruitment advertisement;

– Best special section, sports, Basketball Preview 2017

– Best lifestyle pages, Betsy Bethel, John McCabe, Jan. 8, 2017;

– Best photography, sports, Seth Staskey.