When Sela Breen read about Nelson Lee Graham, , she wanted to tell the bigger story.
“It’s just a horrible story,” she said. “And from there, I started looking into tasers as a whole.”
’s ran in Mindsite News this past June and garnered plenty of attention for the rising senior at Northwestern University, including LinkedIn shoutouts and a radio interview.
When her story took her longer than the allotted course time, she decided to chase it down throughout her junior year, as well. She said she wanted to get the clip, but it was more important than that.
“You don't want to talk to people who've gone through this horrible thing and make them relive their story just to do nothing with it, for it to sit in your Google Drive, right?” she said.
She started the project with the Medill Investigative Lab Chicago, housed in the , taught by professor Kari Lydersen, who works with a team of students every year to investigate social injustices.
“As an entry level reporter and an early career reporter, it's really hard to get experience doing investigative work,” Breen said. Lydersen’s program is one way to get it.
Lydersen has led the program for three years. Every year she steers the class toward a different topic and partners with a range of outlets, she said. Her first year teaching the class, she partnered with Energy News Network and Great Lakes Now to publish into the challenges the EPA faces in enforcing coal ash repository rules.
“I essentially ramp up the investigation before it starts,” she said. “We have the idea for the groundwork laid and then we jump in.”
Students in the lab focus on filing public records requests, analyzing data and sorting through and interpreting court documents, Lydersen said. They also conduct interviews and work as a team to “design and structure an investigation.”
Students have been published in , and , according to .
Medill also offers a Washington, D.C. investigative lab, overseen by Debbie Cenziper, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who writes for ProPublica. In 2023, students in her lab partnered with Propublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to produce , an investigation into Philips Respironics and its recall of millions of breathing devices.
Breen took Lydersen’s course, which is offered to graduate and undergraduate students alike, two years ago during her sophomore year. Her class had about 10 graduate students and five undergrad students, she said.
Students work on one centralized story together before they each write individual articles which dive into an angle of their own, Lydersen said. When Breen took the course, students worked together to investigate police responses to mental health calls.
’s angle was tasers.
Lydersen said the students get course credit for the work, and sometimes they get paid by outlets that run their stories. If they want to keep pursuing their project like Breen did, the program has some money for them.
“We have paid students to keep working on the project after it's over,” Lydersen said. “Partly with the Northwestern alumni grant and partly just with our Medill money.”
Since taking the investigative lab, ’s written for her campus newspaper, , and interned for two mental health magazines: and .
She said she hadn’t given mental health reporting much thought before reporting for the Medill Investigative Lab, but it’s now “something I’m definitely, definitely going to keep pursuing in whatever job I end up getting.”