WALTHAM — The Provincetown Independent won 17 awards at the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s annual convention on March 23.

The newspaper won six first-place prizes among weeklies in the association’s annual Better Newspaper competition. News Editor Paul Benson won first prize for General News Reporting for a series of four articles on the National Park Service’s plan for leasing the Province Lands dune shacks (“Park Advertises 10-Year Leases on Dune Shacks,” “Sal Del Deo, 94, Is Ordered to Leave Dune Shack,” “Park Service Boards Up a Dune Shack, Then Changes Course,” and “As Deadlines Draw Near, Park Service Clams Up”).

Benson and staff reporter Christine Legere won first prize for Climate Change or Weather Reporting for their coverage of the December 2022 storm flooding in Provincetown and its aftermath (“Provincetown Inundated With Wind and Waves,” “Maps Foretold Two Coastal Flooding Events in Provincetown,” and “Slow Repairs and Housing Search Remain After Flood“).

Former Managing Editor K.C. Myers won two first prizes: in Education Reporting, for her February 2023 article “Nauset Officials Covered Up Bullying Incidents,” and in the Social Issues Feature competition for two articles about the murder of Susan Howe and the suicide of her son, Adam Howe, in a New Bedford jail cell (“A Troubled Son Takes Mother’s Life and His Own” and “Nowhere to Turn When the Mentally Ill Refuse Treatment”).

Staff reporter Sam Pollak won first prize in Arts and Entertainment Reporting for his December 2022 story about the creation of an opera based on Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours. And staff reporter Sophie Mann-Shafir took first prize in Science/Technology Reporting for a June 2023 story, “The Lesbian Seagulls That Revealed a History of Suppressed Science.”

Second-place awards were won by editors John D’Addario and Abe Storer and designer Susan Abbott for the Independent’s Arts & Minds section; by Teresa Parker in the Living Section competition for the newspaper’s Inside/Out section; and by Pollak and Myers in the Crime and Courts Reporting competition for their October 2022 investigation titled “Why Three Men Died This Summer in County Jail.” Myers left the Independent in April 2023 to take the job of communications director for newly elected Barnstable County Sheriff Donna Buckley.

Second-place awards were also won by two of the Independent’s 2023 summer journalism fellows: Nicholas Miller, who was honored in Business/Economic Reporting for his three-part series on scalloping, and Elias Schisgall in Transportation Reporting for “Three Route 6 Incidents Highlight Summer’s Risks.”

Kai Potter won third prize in the Serious Columnist competition for his “On the Landscape” columns. Sam Pollak took third place (his third award of the evening) in Government Reporting for a three-part series on financial mismanagement in Wellfleet. Emma Madgic, who was in the 2022 cohort of summer journalism fellows, won third prize in Health Reporting for her coverage of abortion rights on Cape Cod. And staff writer Eve Samaha won third prize in the Food Page category for her July 2023 article on making ice pops.

Eve and her sister, Dorothea, also an Independent staff writer, received an honorable mention in Arts and Entertainment Reporting for their April 2023 dispatch from New York City, “Wellfleet’s Ella Mae Dixon Makes Her Birdland Debut.”

Also at last weekend’s convention, this reporter was one of five people to receive the Yankee Quill Award from the Academy of New England Journalists, given in recognition of the “lifetime achievement of those who have had a broad influence for good, both inside and outside the newsroom.” He had been nominated for the prize by Myers, who wrote in her letter to the Academy that Miller “will not be stopped by naysayers, a global pandemic, labor shortages, a housing crisis, or human exhaustion.”

He’s the kind of editor, she wrote, who’s “still questioning the position of every comma at 1 in the morning and penning editorials that regularly slam the gavel down on ignorance and complacency.”