On September 20, 41-year-old Adnan Syed walked out of a Baltimore court after his conviction in the murder of one Hae Lee Min was overturned. Hae Lee Min’s body was found in 1999. Mr. Syed had been in jail for 23 years.
As a case of possibly wrongful decades-long incarceration, this was nothing new for the U.S. However, this was the ‘Watergate’ moment for a medium that has been coming into its own over the last 20 years.
Mr. Syed’s case formed the core of Serial, a podcast hosted by journalist Sarah Koenig that, in an arc of 12 episodes between 2014 and 2016, picked holes in the prosecution case against Mr. Syed. Serial’s episodes have been downloaded over 340 million times, and it sparked the wave of ‘true crime’ podcasts in the U.S. that really pushed the medium into the mainstream. Over one-third of Americans listen to podcasts regularly now, with growth across all age groups. By some estimates India now has over 95 million active monthly podcast users, only behind the U.S. and China.
