The Power of ‘Serial’ in Podcasting

Serial is the new podcast from the producers of the public radio show, also turned podcast, This American Life. You might have heard about Serial from a pop culture-related website, a news segment on TV or maybe from a eager listener friend on Facebook that is actively debating whether “Adnan did or did not do it”. The podcast dives into a nonfiction story and, unlike This American Life, it’s told week by week, over multiple episodes.

Here’s what the first season of Serial is about: On January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park. She’d been strangled. Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested for the crime, and within a year, he was convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. The case against Syed was largely based on the story of one witness, Adnan’s friend Jay, who testified that he helped Adnan bury Hae’s body. But Adnan has always maintained he had nothing to do with Hae’s death. Some people believe he’s telling the truth. Many others don’t.

Sarah Koening, host and executive producer of the show, does a great job putting together the testimonies around Hae’s murder 15 years ago and delivering them in episodic form. Serial is exciting and intriguing, it’s become the internet’s new favorite thing to talk about on social media and intense threads on Reddit. As I type this, Serial is 10 episodes in; it is expected to run for 12 episodes this season.

Serial has become the most downloaded podcast in history. That means more people are exploring the exciting territory of audio entertainment. I find this fact to be very exciting for us, the listeners. It’s a call to a generation of new writers, producers to become inspired, to create new content for this media outlet. Can you imagine the possibilities? I can very well see the radio drama being brought back into current popular culture, presented to millennials by millennials. The minds behind NBC Nightly News, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and many, if not all, NPR programs have successfully integrated their shows into podcast format: proof that there’s a large audience willing to consume audio productions on a regular basis. Podcasts will keep reinventing themselves and its genres, more people will start listening.

Some context here: Podcast, the media form as we know it, has been around since late 2004. It earned particularly big notice when Apple integrated podcasts to its music store iTunes, this made possible to subscribe, download and later listen to the audio programs on your computer or on your portable media device. Since then, podcasts have become accessible to many internet users, and today, the iTunes Store and other podcasting distribution applications carry over 150,000 audio podcasts. After 10 years of its invention I believe we are entering a new era of podcasting; many creative teams are putting together great storytelling pieces, also very serious journalism-investigating work on to hour-long audio episodes. This is an exciting time to be part of the “radio-on-steroids” industry, as a creator or spectator.

Serial – Season 01. Episode 01: The Alibi.