Students contribute to Reuters investigation
An investigative series of Reuters stories about hundreds of deaths that followed police use of Tasers relies partly on months of reporting by two Media School students.
Senior Sara Miller and James Benedict, who graduated in May with a degree in journalism, began internships with Reuters in March and continued to work remotely with the international news agency throughout the summer.
They dug through lawsuits, medical examiners’ records and police reports on deaths related to stun gun use as part of a team that examined how each person died.
The students also joined Reuters reporters in making phone calls to people who had been affected, and in one case, to relatives whose loved one died.
At first, Miller said, it was unclear how the data she and Benedict examined would fit into the big picture of the project. But she soon realized their work was at the core of the series, after reading drafts of stories — and especially after she and Benedict visited Reuters’ Washington office and saw drafts of graphics that accompanied them.
“It was kind of an ‘aha’ moment for me, because a lot of the stories are grounded in the data we helped collect,” she said. “That was the moment that made everything click for me. I got to see how all the assignments I had were playing an important role in the project.”
The project started with an email from professor of practice Elaine Monaghan, a former Reuters correspondent, to Jason Szep, Reuters’ Washington-based U.S. national affairs editor.
“I’d been looking for an opportunity to get IU’s exceptional journalism students working with my former Reuters colleagues, and to my delight, Jason responded within a few days saying he had a project he needed some help with,” Monaghan said.
“That is the very point of this whole project, that people don’t know this is happening. It was a learning experience for me, in handling brutal subject matter and brutal reports.”
—Senior Sara Miller
The idea of a student-industry collaboration grew out of an earlier project with New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who spent time at The Media School in the fall and spring as inaugural chair of the IU Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. Students including Benedict and Miller used data visualization to illustrate a story Cohen wrote on migrants being held at Manus and Nauru.
For the Reuters project, Benedict and Miller worked on a database of cases of people who had died following police use of Tasers in a variety of settings, including psychiatric and other facilities. They followed up with phone calls to medical examiners, police departments and lawyers, fleshing out the data with other factors and variables, including lawsuits filed by family members.
“I can’t say enough good things about the flexible approach, sensitive mentoring on an emotionally challenging topic, and collaborative spirit of Jason and the investigative team,” Monaghan said. “And I couldn’t be more impressed by the way Sara and James threw themselves into something unfamiliar with courage, determination and intelligence.”
Benedict said he “learned a ton” from the internship.
A highlight of the internships, which were ongoing at the time of writing, was when he and Miller wrote a sidebar together about the physical experience of being stunned with a Taser.
Miller, an Ernie Pyle scholar, said the sheer scope of the project was of immense educational value — as well as its content, despite its distressing nature.
“But that is the very point of this whole project, that people don’t know this is happening,” she said. “It was a learning experience for me, in handling brutal subject matter and brutal reports.
“It’s gratifying to know that the work I’m doing, as limited as it may be, is ultimately going to help tell this story that needs to be told.”
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