Ms. Newman, the Journalism teacher and Alumni Relations and Student Publications Coordinator at Wooster, recently won a second-place award in the Hearst Journalism Sports Writing Competition, which is considered to be one of the most prestigious student journalist competitions in the United States. She was nominated by the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.
Ms. Newman won the award for an investigative sports journalism piece she wrote while she was a student at Syracuse University. The piece, “SU Football female interns speak out on bias, double standards,” focused on the experience of female interns working for the Syracuse football program. She was able to gain insight into issues such as gender bias, double standards and working conditions.
When writing the article, Ms. Newman spoke with many interns, both past and present, and from different departments, as a way to gain different perspectives. Some interns chose to go on record, while others wanted to stay anonymous. When protecting their identities, Ms. Newman had to be extremely careful due to the severity of this topic. Many interns were hesitant to have their names associated with this article, fearing it would impact their internships.
The conversations allowed her to understand what their day-to-day responsibilities were and gave her a deeper insight into how they were treated by the men who were working closely with them. Although the experiences varied from woman to woman, hearing these different perspectives shed light on how poorly women working in sports can be treated by men.
Ms. Newman's idea for this article surfaced when she learned about the experience of intern Lauren Demuria through mutual connections. This led her to ask more questions and reach out to other interns within the program who faced similar challenges to Demuria’s.
The article originally started as a project for a magazine writing class Ms. Newman took while studying at Syracuse, but as she continued interviewing and gaining deeper insight into female interns' experiences, she realized the topic needed further research and more attention.
As the interview process progressed and her writing continued, she noted that one of the most difficult parts of the entire process was properly organizing the different experiences into an informative and cohesive piece. While many interns described their experience as feeling disrespected by staff, others’ experiences were less negative, making it extremely difficult to accurately convey everyone's experience.
“They all had varying experiences, so it was really hard to have a cohesive narrative that goes all into one story,” Ms. Newman said.
Ms. Newman mentioned that there were cases where some interns chose to leave their internships due to how unfairly they were being treated and the amount of bias they were facing. Since some interns had very negative experiences with both the football players and the football staff members, they became less hesitant to speak openly.
Before officially publishing the article, she also reached out to the football team and gave them an overview of the comments made by the interns, giving them a chance to react and respond with a statement, included in the final piece.
“It took me probably about 5 months to do this, which was definitely a bigger process than I would have imagined in the beginning,” Ms. Newman said.
Ms. Newman had won several awards for this piece prior to the Hearst Competition, including an Honorable Mention for Investigative Sports Story through the 2025 College Media Association Pinnacle, 2nd Place in DEI writing for the AEJMC Magazine Media Division Student Magazine Contest and 4th Place for the New Story category by the Associated Collegiate Press Clips and Clicks contest. Even though she had already been recognized for this piece, she said, “This is definitely the biggest one, so I was really excited.”
This piece was extremely important in sports journalism because it emphasizes limited opportunities for female interns in football, due to football being a particularly male-dominated sport. In her article, Ms. Newman highlighted the challenges faced by women, including bias, double standards and the doubting of women's abilities from coaches, players and their supervisors. By understanding and revealing women's challenging experiences in football, she addresses the importance of recognizing the unfairness women face, in hopes of working towards a change.
Crosby '27
Advanced Journalism Student
