Teri Finneman has won the second annual Michael S. Sweeney Award for her article, “‘The Greatest of Its Kind Ever Witnessed in America’: The Press and the 1913 Women’s March on Washington.” Named for former Journalism History editor Mike Sweeney, the award recognizes the outstanding article published in the previous volume of the journal. Finneman will receive a plaque and cash prize during the History Division’s awards gala Aug. 6 at the AEJMC National Convention in Toronto.

Teri Finneman, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, has won the second annual Michael S. Sweeney Award for her article, “‘The Greatest of Its Kind Ever Witnessed in America’: The Press and the 1913 Women’s March on Washington.”

Presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the Sweeney Award recognizes the outstanding article published in the previous volume of the scholarly journal Journalism History. Finneman will receive a plaque and cash prize during the division’s awards gala Aug. 6 at the AEJMC National Convention in Toronto.

Published in the Summer 2018 issue, Finneman’s winning article examined press coverage previewing the 1913 women’s parade on Washington to foster a better understanding of how the press covers women’s activism and social movements in general. Using social movement theory to examine the framing strategies used by the press, Finneman found an emphasis on motivational and counterframing focused on episodic rather than thematic coverage. The article also builds on literature of women in political roles facing pushback from other women, thereby undermining the advancement of women for all of them.

The History Division’s Publications Committee selected the article from among five finalists provided by Journalism History Editor Gregory Borchard. Publications Committee Chair Therese Lueck said that the quality of the finalists made judging challenging, but they deemed Finneman’s revealing theoretical perspective on the 1913 Suffrage march as “important” and “outstanding.” The judges commented, “The paper is a captivating read,” and they were impressed by “how the author acknowledges the role of race and class.”

Finneman, who earned her Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, was formerly a print journalist and multimedia correspondent covering state government, business and enterprise. She is the author of Press Portrayals of Women Politicians, 1870s-2000s, which was a finalist for the 2016 Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha book award. Her documentary, “Newspaper Pioneers: The Story of the North Dakota Press,” premiered in 2017.

The other finalists for the 2019 Sweeney Award were James Kates, “Editor, Publisher, Citizen, Socialist: Victor L. Berger and His Milwaukee Leader” (Summer 2018); Robert E. Wright, “Pioneer Financial News: National Broadcast Journalist Wilma Soss, NBC Radio, 1954-1980” (Fall 2018); Pamela E. Walck and Ashley Walter, “Soaring out of the Private Sphere: How Flyin’ Jenny and Comics Helped Pioneer a New Path for Women’s Work during World War II” (Winter 2019); and Denitsa Yotova, “Antebellum Urban Reporting as Literary Journalism and Muckraking: George G. Foster’s City Sketches in the New York Press” (Winter 2019).

The History Division created the award in 2018 to honor Michael S. Sweeney, who served as editor of Journalism History from 2012 to 2018 and worked to ensure its future by initiating the transition from an independent publication to the official scholarly publication of the History Division.