Sarah Koenig Catches Lightning With Her 'Serial' Podcast
It’s been quite a year for Sarah Koenig. The Sagaponack native and Sag Harbor summer resident has gone from being known among a small, quirky subset of brainy public radio listeners for “This American Life” to what might be called an international sensation among a larger, quirky set of brainy podcast listeners. All for “Serial,” which has set iTunes records for being the fastest podcast to reach more than 5 million downloads and streams.
As Stephen Colbert observed when he interviewed her on one of the last episodes of “The Colbert Report,” which ended last Thursday, as did this season of “Serial,” she is the “world’s first superstar podcaster.” (He also said she was his favorite guest of all time.) He then asked her if she always wanted “to do true-crime reporting that people listen to on a treadmill?”
Speaking via phone from New York City the day after, she said being on Mr. Colbert’s show was “really fun; he’s such a nice man. I thought I’d be super freaked out and nervous, but I had a good time.”
The series and its enthusiastic reception has led to interviews and analysis in media outlets all over the world, including The New York Times, The Guardian, “PBS NewsHour,” Time, and The Atlantic, among many, many others. There are podcasts, such as “Slate’s Serial Spoiler Specials,” about the podcast, and Twitter handles and hashtags that evolved from the mispronunciation of one of the podcast’s sponsors during a recognition spot that leads into each episode: #mailkimp, anyone? And BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast the episodes every night at 9 from early December leading up to the finale last week.
“Serial” centers on a murder of a high school senior in Baltimore County, Md. Hae Min Lee, a popular student at Woodlawn High School, went missing in January 1999 and was found strangled a couple of weeks later in a shallow grave. A few weeks after that, Adnan Syed, who was her ex-boyfriend, was arrested and eventually convicted of the murder, with a sentence of life plus 30 years.
Ms. Koenig was approached by a friend of the family who thought Mr. Syed was innocent and that his conviction was based on faulty circumstantial evidence and inadequate representation. She pursued the case and, after more than a year of research, began the podcast on Oct. 3.
Part of the appeal comes from Ms. Koenig and her team as their discussions on the show parse each aspect of the case: retracing the timeline as presented at trial, visiting the key sites, and puzzling over the inconsistencies in the evidence and testimony.
“I had no idea it would get this big, that this many people would be listening, and listening closely.” She said it was a great reminder of how important it is to make “that third phone call or quadruple check of a fact.”
Although a friend alerted her that people involved with the story would come forward in response to the show, she said, “It’s funny, I hadn’t totally thought it through. I guess I’m a dummy and naive about how the media works, oddly.” It did happen in one case she could think of, but much of the new details came from people they had already interviewed, whose memory was jogged by information presented in the show.
And there’s even more: Some 28,000 people have participated in an online Reddit forum dedicated to the show, with devotees offering their own evidence and theories of the case. It’s a large enough group to need its own policing and has several monitors assigned to it to make sure things stay civil and private information about the people the show discusses is not posted or abused.
Why all the hullabaloo? Chiefly, it seems that Ms. Koenig has taken a medium, the podcast, and revealed what it can be at its full narrative potential, incorporating the best aspects of journalism and its ability to tell a true story with rich detail and complexity. Through her background and current experience at “This American Life,” which does the same thing on a more limited scale for radio, she is someone uniquely situated and qualified to do so.
Her father was Julian Koenig, who lived part time in Bridgehampton. An advertising executive, he was the creative mind behind Timex’s “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking” slogan and groundbreaking campaigns for the Volkswagen Beetle, among many others. The stories he told through ads were super-quick, but full of resonance. Her stepfather was Peter Matthiessen, a writer of fiction and highly evocative nonfiction and co-founder of The Paris Review. Both men died earlier this year.
Ms. Koenig did not wish to discuss those personal losses, but she did share remembrances of childhood spent in those households. “My stepfather was a writer, so there were lots of writers and artists around. I think what was great growing up in that house for me was that conversation was so highly prized as a thing to do and to engage in in a real way. I didn’t understand how great that was and how rare it was in some ways.”
When confronted with dinner parties where people are talking mainly about office politics, her response is, “This isn’t a conversation! This is supposed to be more interesting, and it can be if we put more effort and value in being thoughtful in what you say and stay curious about the world.”
Such an ethos certainly guides her work in “Serial,” where she is always cognizant that this is a story in which someone died, the victim’s family and friends are still stricken with the loss, and someone is spending his life in prison who may or may not be guilty of the crime.
The process of reporting it was similar to work on “This American Life” segments. “It is the same stuff you do — relentless phone calls, endless emails — we just got more time on this one. It’s like any story, it’s not done just because you’re done” or it’s due. She said there were a ton of stories with “lingering questions and enough confusion surrounding them” that you “could never be done with them.”
A new season with a new subject is promised for 2015, which, given how much time went into this one, is probably already chosen but was not something she would share.
Some of the downside of all the attention is the inevitable backlash. There have been articles both attacking and defending the show’s treatment of race and immigration and some questioning whether she has withheld information for narrative effect.
“These are people’s real lives. This is not a game,” Ms. Koenig said. “If there is any factual information I’ve withheld, it was for very strong journalistic reasons,” things she and her producers were not able to confirm or fact-check. “I feel glad I work with people who care this much about getting it right.”
The format of the show also dictates how information is relayed. “I can’t give everything at once . . . there has to be logic and an arc to the structure. In the first part of the series I need you to know what I know about the case, the basics‚” so that the audience can then use that information to weigh the further evidence presented. “Of course I could make one 12-hour story, but who’s going to listen to that?”
Her journalistic credentials are impressive. At “This American Life” she won a Peabody Award for co-producing a 2006 episode. Prior to that she had stints at The Concord Monitor and then The Baltimore Sun, where in 2001 she reported on the improprieties and eventual disbarment of Christine Gutierrez, who was Mr. Syed’s defense attorney at his first trial and considered one of the best at the time. Ms. Gutierrez died in 2004.
And before that, Ms. Koenig was in Moscow, first with ABC News and then with The New York Times. Her first reporting job, however, was with The East Hampton Star. She started in the summer covering benefit parties and then stayed on for another year. “It was my first job. I got to do everything. I learned a ton, all the basics.”
She comes back to Sag Harbor every summer per an arrangement with her husband, Ben Schreier, a professor at Penn State University, which is where they live with their children the remainder of the year. She still thinks of Sag Harbor and Sagaponack as her home.
“It was my condition that if we moved to the middle of Pennsylvania, we had to get out to Long Island for three months a year.”
Although she has been in New York City recently for interviews and traveled to Baltimore for much of the research for the show, a lot of the work is done in the basement of her house in State College, where she records and writes. It is also where she runs the risk, when she goes down in the morning, of emerging hours later still in her pajamas, and why she keeps an office in town as well.
It’s the kind of campus-based household where she has found students peeing on her lawn in the wee hours of the morning, documented in an all-night stakeout for “This American Life,” and where their one television, which broke a few years ago, has never been replaced.
At the time of the interview for this article, the last episode was still in production, and she was not sure how it would end. A draft was due in a few days “and I really don’t know what’s going to be in it. I’m being really serious.” She had to keep the interview short, as “three fires were burning” already, presumably new information that did come to light in the last episode. Some followers of the series may have hoped for a huge revelation or denouement. Yet the story, while progressing, left many questions it had posed unanswered, but not for lack of trying.
“I’m sure there will be a few people who aren’t happy it ends this way, but that has to be okay. It’s not a drama. I can’t make up a neat ending that isn’t there,” Ms. Koenig said. “It has to come straight from reporting, as it should be. . . . A Hollywood ending was always impossible, it’s not what we’re doing.”