Sarah Koenig had a confession to make to the 2,000-odd people gathered at London’s Southbank Centre: despite having created the most successful podcast of all time, she doesn’t listen to any outside of work. “I’m sorry!” Koenig hastily proffered, her pitch rising. “I knew I’d be asked about it and was thinking I should come up with something, but I knew that would be a lie!”
Koenig, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland, was in the UK for an International Women’s Podcast Festival event to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Serial, the hit documentary series that changed the medium forever. Serial, a spin-off of the renowned This American Life radio show and podcast, has amassed more than 300 million downloads and a prestigious Peabody Award since it was first released in 2014. The first it podcast, Serial proved a popular gateway to the medium, which soon grew exponentially: only 8 per cent of Americans listened to a podcast weekly in 2014; that has since more than quadrupled to 34 per cent – equivalent to 98 million people – while the global podcasting market is worth an estimated $24bn. The proliferation of the true crime genre in particular can be traced back to Serial’s first season: a 12-episode investigation into the 1999 killing of the 18-year-old Baltimore high-schooler Hae Min Lee and the trial that led to her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, being convicted of her murder. (In 2022, Syed’s guilty verdict was vacated in light of new DNA testing and information about the possible involvement of two different suspects. It has since been reinstated following various appeals.)
“I’m not an aficionado of audio, which I know sounds weird, because this is what I do,” Koenig – wearing a navy blazer and a blue shirt, open at the neck to expose a shark-tooth-shaped necklace – told me. We spoke over a coffee at a scooter-themed café in Waterloo, south London, the day after her Southbank show. “I love it, but the fact that I work in it is almost accidental.”
For Koenig, who began her career as a print journalist, the stratospheric success of Serial was also accidental. Having joined the This American Life staff full time in 2004, she had only planned for the story to be a single episode of the show (Julie Snyder, Serial’s co-producer, convinced her otherwise). Koenig considers the almost simultaneous release of the iPhone 6, the first Apple product to come with the Apple Podcast app pre-installed, a “dumb” driver of the show’s popularity. “I don’t look at true crime… I’m not interested in it; I didn’t know that’s what I was making – truly,” Koenig said at the Southbank event, which was hosted by the BBC journalist Samira Ahmed.
There is a sad but perennial truth in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads” – stories involving violence and/or murder capture the public’s attention the most, and win news outlets all-important clicks on their content. But for Koenig, Serial was not about murder but whether the integrity and ideals of the American justice system were being upheld: “There was the basic level of the plot, but that’s not enough of a story for me,” said Koenig, who has always refused to speculate on who murdered Lee. “It was much more [the story] of: ‘How did this person get convicted on this evidence? And is this OK, or is this not OK?’… Could this story be a vehicle to explore the larger questions?”
Nonetheless, more high-minded questions about the functioning of America’s justice system were secondary for an audience keen to work out whodunnit. Witnesses who participated in the series anonymously had their identities revealed by the podcast’s cult following on social media. After Serial aired, an ever-increasing number of true crime podcasts and, more recently, amateur detectives on TikTok, attempted to replicate its success. (In 2023 Lancashire Police criticised social media sleuths and said investigating officers had been “inundated with false information, accusations and rumours” in their search for Nicola Bulley, who had died by accidental drowning.) “Of course that’s worrisome,” Koenig told me. “Should I feel responsible for [that]? Because I kind of don’t. I can’t control what people are doing… I’ve never been a missionary for anything, frankly, but definitely not, ‘Everyone go make a true crime podcast!’”
The first series of Serial faced criticism as well as adoration. “This is not a podcast for me,” Young Lee, Hae’s brother, said in a statement after Syed’s conviction was overturned. “It’s real life that will never end.” Koenig has repeatedly extended her condolences to the Lee family (who did not respond to her invitation to participate in Serial). But she isn’t “too concerned with the chatter” around the series: what matters to Koenig is what her reporting revealed about the justice system. “If people are saying, ‘Well, we shouldn’t be looking at old cases because it might cause pain to the victim’s family,’ I guess I just don’t agree with that. I think you have to look at old cases if you’re going to be exploring whether our system is working – and we have to be exploring whether our system is. I just don’t know how else you do it.”
Sarah Koenig was born in New York City in July 1969. Her father, Julian Koenig, was a copywriter; her mother, Maria Eckhart, is from Tanzania. After the two divorced, Maria went on to marry the American writer Peter Matthiessen, a co-founder of the literary magazine the Paris Review.
What started as a spin-off from This American Life became its own bona fide operation when the New York Times bought the production company behind Serial in 2020 for a reported $25m. Against a backdrop of decline in American journalism – last year, more than 21,400 jobs were lost, the highest number since 2020 – the financial freedom the sale afforded Koenig and her colleagues at Serial Productions has been a “privilege”, she said. There have now been four seasons of Serial – and a further eight long-form audio series by Serial Productions – on topics including the captivity under the Taliban and subsequent desertion of the US soldier Bowe Bergdahl, and the repeated failures to close Guantánamo Bay.
With both online disinformation and political corruption rife, what effect could the decline of US media have on its ability to hold politicians to account? Koenig pauses for the first time in our hour-long conversation. “I don’t know. I know I’m supposed to, but when I look historically at the problems that society has faced over time, they seem pretty constant to me, so maybe we’ve never been that great of a power as we think in journalism.” Rather, she suggested, outlets are more like “a Chihuahua, more nipping at the heels of power”.
Koenig raises Donald Trump’s claim at a September presidential election debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating domestic pets. “It’s so insane, but it’s such a clean example of absolute nonsense taking over the national conversation. And I guess what I’m wondering is: how many Americans still believe that to be true? Have we done enough of a good job of broadcasting across the nation, ‘This is bullshit – and we have a vice-presidential candidate [JD Vance] who’s essentially admitted that it’s bullshit, but that it’s useful, rhetorically’?”
Koenig, who sounds assured in her carefully scripted podcasts, struggled to articulate her angst in person: “Please know that I am not an expert on this – this is, like, just me talking, right?” To her, the issues Americans face are “not just a disinformation problem” but ruptures born from persistent structural inequalities. “Even if you debunk the nonsense – ‘The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump: not true. Immigrants are eating dogs: not true…’ – what those things speak to is a deeper schism in the country, which is an economic one: that the difference between the haves and have-nots is so huge in the United States and so entrenched. That’s the problem – and that’s the one that our politics and policy isn’t speaking to.”
According to Sarah Koenig, that chasm is “not something that originated with Trump, in the same way that Boris Johnson didn’t come from nowhere, either”. Instead, the bigger picture needs to be considered. “What I see [are] the same issues for decades and centuries not being properly addressed by our capitalist democracy, and these are the fruits of that problem. And so yes, the media plays a role; yes, politicians play a role. But if you’re going to have this economic system and not address the massive ways in which it fails at least half – if not more – of the people, this is what happens. This is where it ends.”
[See also: The new media barons]
