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.”
Serial was about five episodes in when she learned they had hit 1m downloads (that figure has since risen to a staggering 300m). “And then I started getting emails from celebrities,” she laughs. “I’d always wondered how come celebrities all seem to find one another. It turns out they just pretend they already know you.” Near the end of the series, a friend called to ask if she’d watched Saturday Night Live. She hadn’t, meaning she had missed seeing herself spoofed in a sketch starring Cecily Strong and Amy Adams. “A part of me was thrilled, of course,” Koenig says. “But I was also, like: ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. What have I done?’” For her, Serial’s runaway success was “just so strange. You know, I have an ego. I wanted to be an actor at one point. I like to perform and I get a high from that, so I enjoyed it in an ego way. But as a reporter, it was terrifying.”
When I speak to Koenig, 55, via video call, she is on holiday visiting her mother in Long Island. In a slouchy shirt and wearing her trademark horn-rimmed specs, she is a thoughtful and funny presence. For the dedicated pod listener, just hearing her mellow, quizzical tones is quite the Proustian rush. Koenig and her family – she is married with two adult children – live in Baltimore, though her office is in NYC’s New York Times Building. In 2020, the New York Times bought Serial Productions for a reported $25m, since when Koenig has overseen the production of multiple podcasts, some of them her own (Serials 1-4) and some the work of fellow reporters (Nice White Parents, The Trojan Horse Affair, The Retrievals and more).
This October marks 10 years since the launch of Serial’s first season. Much has changed in the industry in the interim. First came the post-Serial audio boom, when everyone and their dog was launching a podcast, and media companies and streaming services all rushed to assemble their own audio divisions. Practically overnight, true crime exploded as scores of audio creators restyled themselves as amateur sleuths dedicated to reheating cold cases, each hoping for a Serial-sized hit. (Nowadays, true-crime podcasters are increasingly becoming a TV archetype, turning up in dramas such as Bodkin, Truth Be Told, The Jetty and Only Murders in the Building). But then, after Covid, the bubble seemed to, if not quite burst, then rapidly deflate as scores of podcasts failed to recoup their investment and creators were laid off.
Koenig says she doesn’t pay much attention to the business side of things – “That’s more Julie’s area. She pulls me in when there are big things to discuss.” Nonetheless, even Koenig has felt the struggle to get her projects noticed in a crowded field. After launching the fourth series of Serial this year, about Guantánamo Bay, the US detention centre for suspected terrorists, she noticed “good friends and family – like, even my siblings – saying: ‘Oh, did it come out? What happened with the Guantánamo story? What are you working on now?’ They haven’t clocked it. We can speculate about the topic and the quality of it, but I think it’s also just the [pod] universe is completely different. There are so many choices. We are in a sea of podcasts.” While attending audio conferences and events, she has also observed “a lot of worry and long faces and people who have just lost their jobs … And it’s not just the crappy shows that are falling under. It’s really popular and high-quality ones losing funding, too. We are in a very worrisome cycle.”
There’s been another change since the first Serial. In 2022, Adnan Syed, the subject of that series, had his conviction overturned and was released after 23 years of incarceration. While that decision was based on new evidence, it was Serial that raised the profile of the case and cast doubt on the original conviction. In response, Koenig released a bonus Serial episode, Adnan Is Out, running through the chain of events that led to his release and describing the atmosphere in the courtroom.
For Koenig, it was “weird, because I didn’t know it was going to happen and I’d stopped reporting on [the case] long ago. And I didn’t consider it my mission to stick with it until the bitter end. And people recognised me, of course, and were taking photographs of me while I was trying to do my job, so that part of it was not fun. But all that said, it was fascinating, too. Just the news of it was extraordinary. And the courtroom was a three-minute bike ride from my house, so I felt like it was all in my back yard.” Is she in touch with Syed? “We’re not in constant touch, no, but if one of us wanted to speak to the other then we could.”
Koenig’s instinct for a story is a result of a long career as a print reporter. Her first job in journalism was as a copy clerk at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1990s: “It’s the only job I ever just walked out of. And nobody noticed, I never got a phone call. They were, like: ‘I guess she’s gone.’” After that came a detour into acting as part of a comedy improv troupe in New York. She’s still friends with the actors, “several of whom are very successful in theatre now. At the time, I saw that as my main job, and other work was just for paying the bills.” But then she got a summer job working at a local newspaper, the East Hampton Star, and ended up staying for a year and a half. After that came jobs at ABC News, the New York Times’s Moscow bureau, New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor newspaper and the Baltimore Sun.
Getting a job on This American Life in the mid-2000s was a breath of fresh air as it meant she could finally take her time with stories. “Audio has always felt to me like a place where you get to explain the nuance of whatever story you’re telling … Our mission was not a news mission, it was narrative storytelling.” That ethos has been carried through into Serial Productions where “it is very much about what interests the people in the room”. When it was bought by the New York Times, they were told to keep doing what they were doing – “which means that we are choosing our stories. I don’t know that we would have joined any other company under different circumstances. We wouldn’t have sold ourselves in that way.”
There have now been four seasons of Serial: along with the murder of Hae Min Lee and the story of Guantánamo Bay, it has also covered the US soldier Bowe Bergdahl and his kidnapping by the Taliban, and the American criminal justice system as seen in a single courthouse in Cleveland. According to Koenig, the common thread between projects is “the ways in which we judge one another and punish one another in American society. I find that continually interesting and problematic.”
Koenig won’t rule out ever doing a true-crime series again – “Never say never. If the right story came along, and for the right reasons, I would do it” – but she is conscious of not repeating herself. She also remains “spooked by the tornado of attention on regular people [during the first series] who did not sign up for that … Just the way the material was metabolised in the public sphere, the way it was treated as sheer entertainment. I mean, it was entertaining, and we made it entertaining on purpose, but sometimes it felt like that was vaporising into something dumb, [with] people treating it like a puzzle to be solved rather than thinking about the impact on the real people involved who have been through a lot of pain. So that felt bad and I felt responsible for a lot of it.”
What Koenig emphatically does not feel responsible for was the explosion of crime podcasts that Serial inspired, many of them dragging the genre into the mud with shoddy and salacious reporting: “I mean, people saw you could make money this way. That’s the danger [with success], right? But I feel like we held ourselves to a high standard, ethically and journalistically, and I feel good about that. That there are people out in the world who will make shitty things and exploit people and be sloppy? That’s not surprising to me at all.”
And the impact on Koenig herself? She was 45 when Serial went stratospheric, and she has thought a lot about what might have happened had she been younger. “What if I had been 23? Would I have turned into a giant asshole? Maybe, though maybe I’m already a giant asshole. But I felt as if I had perspective the whole time, just knowing: ‘This is my 15 minutes. Enjoy it for the moment. It’s gonna go away.’” And it really has gone away. And sometimes I’m a little, like” – she puts up her hand, as if to say ‘I’m still here’ – “But mostly I don’t care. It was fun but I’m glad it’s over.”
10 Years of Serial: An Evening With Sarah Koenig, part of the International Women’s Podcast festival, is at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 3 October.
