Sarah Koenig on 10 years of the Serial effect: 'there's great journalism in podcasting... and a tonne of crap'

When Sarah Koenig launched Serial a decade ago she says she “barely knew what a podcast was”. These days her name is inextricably linked to the form after the show became a global phenomenon and the most listened to in podcast history.

At its launch, her co-producer Julie Snyder said the early episodes would have to hit 300,000 downloads to justify continuing – only to see them blow through that mark in three days. “It was so quick how it caught on,” Koenig says. “I didn’t really get it until we hit the one million mark or five million mark, I didn’t know what was happening.”