‘Serial’ creators: ‘Truthful reporting can look like art’
Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder visit BAM to discuss world's most popular podcast
When Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, co-creators of the hit podcast “Serial,” embarked on their project, they had modest expectations. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) this past Friday night, they revealed to a packed house that originally they had hoped to attract 300,000 listeners.
“Nobody listens to podcasts,” Koenig recalled thinking at the outset of the series, which launched in the fall of 2014. It traced the progression of a legal case in 12 episodes and quickly became the world’s most popular podcast and the first to win a Peabody Award. With more than 100 million downloads, “Serial” demonstrated that a new form of journalism, uniquely modeled after television, had the potential to sustain a vast audience on a global level.
A spin-off of Ira Glass’ popular program “This American Life,” “Serial” re-opened an investigation into the 1999 strangling death of Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore County, Maryland. Her body was discovered in a city park one month after her disappearance, and her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Syed, now in his mid-30s, still maintains his innocence.
Koenig, who learned about the case from a family friend of Syed’s, investigated it for about a year before the first episode of “Serial” was broadcast; in fact, she continued her investigation throughout the duration of the podcast. As they gained additional information, she and Snyder integrated those discoveries into upcoming episodes. “This was on purpose,” explained Snyder, who served as Koenig’s editor; “we wanted the show to feel alive…this was a difficult story because it really lived in the details.”