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.”

Koenig is in the capital tomorrow night for the International Women’s Podcast Festival at the Southbank Centre, to take part in a Q&A about her career, and there is likely to be huge interest in how Serial became the behemoth that it did.

Serial launched on October 3, 2014 and went on to change the face of podcasting. It has now been downloaded more than 420 million times.

Koenig had been working at This American Life, the US radio show, for almost a decade when her colleague Snyder suggested working on a story as a podcast, because “then all bets are off. We don’t have to sell it, we just release it and whoever comes, comes”.

There was no deadline, no time limit on episodes and they could swear. It was, Koenig says, “the Wild West”. She continues, “the thing that really sold me on it was that she said, ‘If it’s terrible no one will know.’ Because no one listened to podcasts. I barely knew what a podcast was at that time. It felt like a safe way to release it into the darkness.”

Serial followed the case of Adnan Syed, given a life sentence for killing 18-year-old Hae Min Lee in 1999. Koenig co-produced, wrote and narrated the series, looking at whether the conviction was sound. Her feeling at the end of making Serial was the case was “a mess and this isn’t how our system should work.”

Support from This American Life helped bring in the audiences as did the arrival – the same month as the first episode of Serial – of the podcast app being pre-installed on iPhones, making the medium more accessible than ever before.

(Elise Bergerson)

The downloads exploded, and Serial became a hit. Being in the eye of the storm felt “very bizarre and unreal. It was hard to take in,” Koenig says. At the time she didn’t even have a recording booth, and had made a makeshift studio in her basement.

They had only completed three or four episodes when they launched, which put the pressure on when demand skyrocketed. “By the time it took off we were frantic in productions. We’d go to the basement and hunker down for 10 hours.”

She was thrust into the spotlight: Time named her one of the most influential people for 2015, and Serial was spoofed on Saturday Night Live and the Onion. “I enjoyed being the toast of the town for a minute. It was exciting but it was so unexpected. We’re nerdy public radio people… people were having listening parties, we hadn’t anticipated any of that. I felt like I had 10 million eyeballs looking in my notebook.”

The response she saw on social media also left her feeling deeply anxious. “I realised some people were consuming it as entertainment only and not so much as journalism and they weren’t taking seriously these were real people. And that I had contributed to that because of the form of the story I was telling and the way I was telling it. We were all grappling with that.”

In 2022, Syed’s conviction was overturned and he walked free. “To see him walk down the front steps in his own clothes was very effecting,” Koenig says, before adding the case has subsequently been remanded back to the trial court. “It’s in limbo once again. That whole series of events has been extraordinary. It’s a crazy rollercoaster that that case has been on.”

Serial opened the door to more investigative journalism shows as well as more true crime, and Koenig is mixed on what came after.

“There’s really great journalism happening in podcasts,” she says. “In some of them. Not a lot of them but… and that’s great that people are experimenting with the form and stretching it and testing it and seeing what it can do, that’s exciting and I think Serial helped launch all of that. It launched people’s imaginations and capital. The flipside is there’s just a tonne of crap. And… that’s the market.”

Koenig doesn’t feel responsible for the podcasts that treat true crime as entertainment. “If people are going to be cheap and crummy about their jobs that’s not on me,” she says. “And if people are going to take time out of their lives to listen to that crap that’s also not on me. There’s always going to be bad versions of everything.”

Adnan Syed after his conviction was overturned (REUTERS)

True crime has been around for centuries – “We didn’t invent true crime” – she says. “What bums me out as a listener is the sameness of so much of what is out there. I find myself craving stories with a different cadence and structure.

“It feels people have internalised a form of storytelling that they’re like, ‘This is how you do it.’ It’s become the norm. I feel sad about that… the whole point is not to have a norm: make something new.”

Serial released its fourth series earlier this year – it has covered subjects including a soldier held by the Taliban who was charted with desertion, cases in the Justice Center Complex and the history of Guantanamo Bay. It was bought by The New York Times in 2020.

Koenig says, “I feel really proud of the stories we’ve made. What I’m most proud of is we could have kept making the same thing over and over and been really successful but we were never tempted to do that because everyone we work with is really interested in experimenting and stretching ourselves.”

“It’s been 10 years of a lot of fighting and fretting and worrying and trying to make better stuff. I like that. Part of me is also sometimes, ‘I wish we were the only game in town’,” she laughs, given the market is now saturated.

That season one still drives so many of downloads “is great but I’m like, ‘You guys, we got so much better! But I understand we’re in a different universe, there’s a million great podcasts to listen to.”

To end, I ask which podcasts, other than Serial, she would recommend, an the answer is a surprising one: she says she rarely listens to podcasts. “I don’t have a commute, when I run or walk the dog I like to have silence,” she says with a smile. “I’m a terrible person to ask for podcast recommendations.”