Sarah Koenig at Rutgers

Last week I had the awesome opportunity to see Sarah Koenig of Serial and This American Life speak at Rutgers. Her talk was perfect for fans of Serial and investigative journalism. She performed an abridged version of the Leakin Park episode, and then walked us through the process of investigating that part of the story.

I learned that the records released by the police were thousands of scanned pages, in no particular order, lumped together into one pdf file. Sarah and her team had to comb through the file back and forth, looking for connections and trying to discern meaning from cryptic diagrams.

Koenig also talked about the nature of her relationship with Adnan. I don't think there's a word to describe it. She noted that she's probably spoken to Adnan more than anyone else in her life - 2 or 3 1-hour phone calls a week for about a year. She recorded over 42 hours of conversations with him in that time. It's impossible not to develop something that resembles friendship when you spend that much time talking to each other. On the other hand, Koenig pointed out, friends are the people who are in your corner, no matter what. Koenig still doesn't know if Adnan is guilty or innocent, so that definition of friendship definitely does not apply. So what are they? She doesn't know.

A funny anecdote Koenig shared involved a mysterious message that appeared on the Serial Facebook page that said "Adnan did it." It was quickly deleted and the Serial team did not comment publicly on it. Was it a hack? A secret admission from Koenig herself? What actually happened was that the web developer in charge of controlling the comments on the page was testing a filter. The filter didn't work. His test message, "Adnan did it," went live instead of being blocked.


At the end of the talk there was an opportunity for Q&A. I had strategically chosen my seat earlier in the night and was the first person to ask a question.

Once at the mic, I noted that a year ago, if you looked at the top podcasts on iTunes, you would see the work of people like Ira Glass, Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich... basically all men. Since Serial has gained popularity there have been several new podcasts that are hosted by women.

"Well, that's because I invented women," Koenig interrupted. This earned a huge laugh from the crowd.

After the laughs died down I finished my question, asking if she felt responsible for this sudden uptick in female-fronted podcasts.

No, she said. It turns out that Invisibilia was in the works before Serial even got started. As for the added success of Death, Sex, and Money, she attributes that to the recent popularity of reported or investigative journalism podcasts. She pointed out that there are a lot of women who work in radio journalism, so it's not because of Serial, necessarily. It's more the nature of these types of podcasts to have more women involved.


There were a few more gems from the Q&A session worth noting.

One woman accused Koenig of glossing over holes in Adnan's story. Koenig responded, saying "You know about the holes because I told you about them!"

Commenting on how police investigations can improve to prevent some of the ambiguity that came up in Adnan's case, Koenig said that police should record all interviews. It's more common now, but even as recently as last year the NYPD has conducted major interrogations without any recording.

The most heartbreaking thing I learned was that Koenig, a reporter, has spent more time on Adnan's case than his own attorney did. Whether he did commit the murder or not, that seems wrong.

The last thing I'll leave you with is something Koenig said about Adnan, but I think applies pretty universally.

"My producer heard him differently than the way I heard him. Everyone hears him differently."