When Dave Stanley was growing up in Newton, he hardly could have imagined the changes in store for the newspaper industry — or that he would one day traverse that change to become one of the elite members of his profession in Iowa.

Last Friday, during the Iowa Newspaper Association’s annual Better Newspaper Contest awards banquet, the owner and publisher of the New Hampton Tribune and Nashua Reporter received the INA’s highest honor: the Master Editor-Publisher Award. Surprisingly, he never saw it coming.

“I think right before they said my name, they said something about  buying a paper in 2009 — right in the middle of recession,” Stanley said during an interview with Tribune editor Bob Fenske, “and I thought I was probably the only one who had been crazy enough to do that.”