A staff member and a contributing columnist at Banker & Tradesman were recognized for their journalism Saturday night at the annual New England Newspaper & Press Association conference.

The awards were part of the association’s annual Better Newspaper Competition, which evaluates the work of journalists from dozens of daily and weekly newspapers and news sites from across the six New England states from Aug. 1, 2018 to July 31, 2019. Over 3,000 entries were submitted as part of the competition.

Associate Editor Steve Adams won a first place award for government reporting among weekly newspapers with a circulation of less than 6,000 for his story “Affordability Goals Slow to Influence JP/Rox Development,” which examined why Boston’s attempt to create more affordable housing by granting limited density bonuses to market-rate developers in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury was, in fact, not meeting its goals.

Columnist Scott Van Voorhis won first place for a commentary piece among all weekly newspapers in New England for his column “Time to Worry About WeWork,” which made the case that coworking giant WeWork posed an imminent threat to the Boston commercial real estate sector in March 2019, a few months before the company’s IPO infamously imploded amid investor worries and before many media outlets or industry analysts began raising alarms about the firm.