When we cover the news, images matter as well as words.

This was brought home to us this weekend as we gathered in Saratoga Springs with other journalists from across the state for the New York Press Association spring convention.

The convention features an annual contest, which this year had 2,957 entries and was judged by our peers in the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association.

The Enterprise won two first-place prizes — both for strong images.

Carol Coogan, our illustrator, won first place for editorial cartoons with a stunning colored cartoon of an elephant, looking like a bull in a china shop. The elephant, wearing a red cap that says “Make America Great Again,” is standing on parched earth with croskery in pieces all around it. In the foreground is an as-yet-unbroken teapot with a depiction of a globe.

The cartoon illustrated a Nov. 17, 2016 editorial, “The peoples of the world need to work together to save themselves,” cautioning against the undoing of environmental regulations.

Coogan said she felt inspired as she created the image. “It was like it came through me,” she said.

The judges had this to say about her art: “This stands out for two reasons: One, it’s not just an ink drawing, so the style is different and catches the eye but the reason it won is the second reason, which is that it makes its point clearly with art alone. It’s clever and doesn’t hit you with a mallet to be sure you got the point, and it’s well composed to boot.”

Week in and week out, Coogan enlivens our editorials with her art. The judges commented in awarding a second-place prize for our editorials that each was “paired with strong and sensible art.”

Each year, The Enterprise produces a half-dozen or more special sections and among our favorites are those on the Altamont Fair — which we’ve been covering for all of its 125 years.

The Enterprise won first place for Best Special Section Cover for our 2016 preview fair section on Aug. 10. The black-and-white cover stood out in a sea of color competitors. It featured a photograph by Saranac Hale Spencer, taken at a goat’s eye level, of a white goat regarding a farmer’s feet. The goat is in sharp focus, its eyelashes visible against the black background, while the boots resting on the plank in front of it are in soft focus.

The cover, designed by Christine Ekstrom, features a broad brushstroke in black at the bottom with these words in white in complementary type: “Get back to basics at The Altamont Fair.”

“This crisp black and white caught my eye,” wrote the judge. “The goat, the rubber farm boots and the plank of wood are great visuals to fit with the headline ‘Get back to basics.’ The cover is an authentic concept to move beyond the typical fair covers of whirling rides at night or the long-lens shot of the midway. This cover made the magazine stand out from the competitors in fair coverage.”

Enterprise photographer Michael Koff was honored for the second year in a row for his picture stories. Koff uses his lens to capture highlights of high school sports for Guilderland, Voorheesville, and Berne-Knox-Westerlo. And he goes to great lengths — climbing a church steeple this year to record the installation of a carillon — to cover both news and feature stories.

This year, Koff won second place for a Sept. 1 picture page, “The Names March On,” capturing the solemnity of those who visited the traveling Vietnam Memorial Wall.

The page is dominated by a picture of a couple, kneeling in the grass; the husband is a Vietnam veteran looking for the name of a dead comrade. Koff took the picture just as his wife found the name and pointed to it. They are reflected in the smooth surface of the wall.

At top is a long view of the wall with a man who came back each day to look at it. At the bottom of the page is a close-up of a bouquet of yellow roses, leaning against the engraved names alongside the portrait of a young soldier. Rounding out the page is a picture of Boy Scouts carefully folding an American flag.

“These striking images truly convey the solemn mood of the event,” wrote the judges. “There is a good diversity of perspective used in the piece that helps greatly.”

The Enterprise also won awards for its writing this year, including a second place for its coverage of crime, police, and courts. “Good narratives, decent writing structure,” wrote the judges. “Those alone made these submissions stand out above the pack.”

The submission included two in-depth stories by our Guilderland reporter, Elizabeth Floyd Mair. She wrote on July 14 about an assault victim — complete with a picture of her bloodied face — who was upset with the light sentence given her tormenter. Floyd Mair often listens to voices that otherwise would go unheard.

On Aug. 18, Floyd Mair took a wide-ranging look at the pay of local police officers and discovered that the county sheriff’s deputies were paid considerably less than their counterparts in suburban towns, so that there was frequent turnover in the county department as the deputies, after being trained, frequently moved on. Floyd Mair broke both of these stories.

Two of the submissions were by Enterprise editor Melissa Hale-Spencer. She wrote about the “suicide by cop” of a Hilltown resident who was unknown to most of his neighbors. The piece included pictures of the makeshift camp where he had lived.

Hale-Spencer also wrote about Warren Redlich, a lawyer and former Guilderland town councilman, who was maligned with an election flyer falsely labeling him a sexual predator and calling him a “sick twisted pervert.” Redlich, who is arguing his own case against Carl Paladino, Roger Stone, and Michael Caputo, was allowed to to go to trial with his defamation claim.

The fifth crime submission was a joint effort between Hale-Spencer and co-publisher Marcello Iaia on the gunfire at Crossgates Mall. On the day of the shooting, before the mall was locked down, Hale-Spencer arrived on the scene, interviewing customers and mall employees as they fled the scene. She relayed the information to Iaia, who posted words and pictures online as events unfolded. By the time the story was printed on Nov. 17, it included details as well on the arrest and arraignment of Tasheem Maeweather.

The Enterprise also won a second-place prize for its editorials, written by Hale-Spencer. “Power and serious subject matter about abuse, transgender life in schools,” wrote the judges. The package of three included a June 5 editorial about the courage of Guilderland transgender students speaking out. The July 14 editorial was about the woman Floyd Mair had profiled, who had been beaten bloody by her boyfriend, and was then ill served by the local town court.

The Aug. 18 editorial was about villagers in Voorheesville being in an uproar over development plans they knew little about. The editorial called for a coherent plan for Voorheesville’s future, one that involved the public in the process. We’re pleased to note Voorheesville is now in the midst of a master-planning process. (See story on page 1.)

Finally, The Enterprise was once again recognized for its obituaries, winning third place. The prize-winning obituaries were from the Oct. 13 and July 28 editions. The Enterprise, unlike many newspapers, runs all obituaries free of charge with reporters crafting profiles of those who have died.

One of the July 28 obituaries was by H. Rose Schneider, who a year ago began work for The Enterprise, with a freshly-minted journalism degree from the University at Albany, covering the town of New Scotland. She has since moved on to ably cover the four Helderberg Hilltowns.

Schneider’s obituary on Robert “Bobby” VanDer Veer began by describing him as “a lover of football, motocross, and especially his two sons.”

“Well-written…,” the judge wrote. “I thought the story about Dr. Casey was particularly appealing because I can imagine a huge number of people in the community had some dealing with him over the course of their lifetimes and probably soaked up every word in this obit. Daniel Driscoll’s contribution  to his community is probably much less well-known, but equally worthy of note.”

The judge was referring to two obituaries written by Hale-Spencer — one on Dr. Clifford Casey who served Voorheesville for decades as the quintessential family doctor, and the other on Daniel Driscoll, an engineer who dedicated his life to public service, particularly to the Helderberg town of Knox.

Having been refreshed by the accolades of our peers and reinvigorated by workshops on the art and craft of journalism this past weekend, the staff at The Enterprise will continue in our mission — in words and images — to seek the truth and report it fairly. We will continue to record the good times, like the Altamont Fair, as well as the thorny issues. And we’ll continue to use our editorials, with their vibrant illustrations, to enlighten and move forward. We mean to shine a light in dark places. And, finally, we’ll continue to carefully record the worth of the people who have lived in our midst.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer