When Sarah Koenig made her first podcast with fellow producer Julie Snyder, they were, she says, “just trying something”. Both were staffers at the long-running US radio show This American Life and had spent a year working on a project about the death of a Baltimore high-school student, Hae Min Lee, and the man convicted of her murder, Adnan Syed. “This is going to sound fake, but it’s true,” Koenig continues. “Our expectations were really low. I hadn’t listened to any podcasts. Like, at all. We were trying to make a radio show but then Julie suggested making it as a podcast. The idea was that the pressure would be off. If it flops, it would be, like, who cares?”
Newsflash: it didn’t flop. Serial, released in 2014, would change the face of podcasting, becoming the medium’s first blockbuster hit and the first to win a Peabody award. Initially, Koenig was blissfully unaware that their experiment had gone viral. She was reporting “almost in real time, which is insane but that was the energy we wanted”. And so she had her head down “just making the next episode and then the next episode. And I wasn’t on social media, so I was missing all of that.”
