For excellence in editorial content and design, Mainebiz earned eight awards from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers, including silver for Best Newspaper in the Medium Tabloid category.
The awards were announced Tuesday evening in Wilmington, N.C., on the final day of the organization’s summer conference. (Scroll down for a full list of Mainebiz’s awards.) The Norwalk, Conn.-based trade group represents dozens of regional and local business publications in the United States as well as Canada and Australia.
Entries in the annual contest are judged by faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism, housed under the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo.
Adding to his many accolades, Mainebiz Art Director Matt Selva netted gold for Best Overall Design in the Medium Tabloid category for 2025 editions published on May 19 (“Trouble in Toyland“), July 28 (“Portland at a crossroads”), Sept. 8 (“Maine snack attack) and Oct. 6 (“40 Under 40”).
Mainebiz also received a silver award for Best use of Photography/Illustrations and swept the Best Newspaper Medium Tabloid category with its sister publications in Hartford, Conn., and Worcester, Mass. All three are owned by New England Business Media.
“Strong storytelling and thoughtful design go hand in hand,” said Mainebiz Publisher Andrea Tetzlaff, who is also chief operating officer at New England Business Media. “Mainebiz Art Director Matt Selva continues to be recognized for his outstanding design work, and this year was no different.”
For the second year in a row, Mainebiz won a silver award in the Best Ancillary Publication category for Fact Book, praised by the judges as both informative and visually compelling.
“Seeing our editorial and research teams rewarded for their commitment to local, quality journalism was especially meaningful,” Tetzlaff said. “Many of these awards required the teamwork and collaboration of our entire newsroom, which shows in the quality of the content.”
Editorial awards
Mainebiz won four awards in journalism categories for Medium Tabloid publications, including top honors for Best Recurring Feature and Best Beat Reporting — Real Estate.
“Made in Maine,” a series introduced in 2025 to showcase small manufacturers producing a range of products, garnered gold for Best Recurring Feature, based on submissions by Alexis Wells, Renee Cordes and Peter Van Allen.
Gold for the real estate beat recognized cover stories by Tina Fischer, Laurie Schreiber and Renee Cordes.
Cordes, who spent most of her career as a business journalist in Europe before joining Mainebiz in 2017, won gold for Best Beat Reporting — Economics and Finance for stories including “Trouble in Toyland” and “Capital gains.”
She also won gold for Best Feature — Single Story for her “Portland at a crossroads” cover story, adding to recent accolades from the Society for Advancing Business Writing and Editing and the New England Newspaper and Press Association for her in-depth report on the city’s downtown struggles.
Among Mainebiz’s sister publications, the Hartford Business Journal won six awards and the Worcester Business Journal took home five awards from AABP. New England Business Media is owned and led by CEO Tom Curtin.
Earlier this year, Mainebiz won a total of five awards from the New England Newspaper and Press Association, including first place honors for longtime contributing photographer Tim Greenway. That brings the publication’s 2026 awards tally to 14.
“The annual Alliance of Area Business Publishers conference is a major event for us. Beyond the awards, we come back with a lot of ideas. It’s great to meet the publishers, editors and reporters at other business publications and see how they do things,” said Mainebiz Editor Peter Van Allen.
