ST. PAUL, Minn. — Nine months after being left in the dark by the parent company of Minnesota Public Radio, the award-winning true crime podcast “In the Dark” has found a new home with the New Yorker magazine and Conde Nast Entertainment.
Conde Nast announced this week that the staff of the St. Paul-based podcast — including co-creators Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark — will initially work with the the New Yorker’s reporters and editors to produce and distribute the third season of “In the Dark” as part of the publisher’s expanding audio division. The podcast staff are likely to work on additional narrative series across the publisher’s magazine portfolio.
To date, “In the Dark” has produced two full series, the first based on the disappearance of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in 1989 in St. Joseph, Minn., and the second centered on the murder case against Curtis Flowers, a Black man sentenced to die after being tried six times for the killings of four people at a Mississippi furniture store.
Flowers, whose conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 following the podcast’s revelations, was ultimately released from prison after prosecutors declined to try him a seventh time. Each of the two inaugural seasons of “In the Dark” won a George Foster Peabody Award — the highest honor in broadcast media. The second season also won the prestigious duPont-Columbia and George Polk journalism awards.
American Public Media canceled the true-crime audio series and eliminated eight positions last July, little more than a month after laying off the managing director of the investigative unit APM Reports. Conde Nast announced last week it had acquired “In the Dark” from American Public Media, as well as the prior two seasons and a miniseries, and a related archive of written stories and multimedia.
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