Why the investigation of Adnan Syed has become a widespread phenomenon

Adnan Syed leaves the Cummings Courthouse in Baltimore on Monday. The judge has ordered Syed’s release after overturning his conviction in the 1999 murder case, which was chronicled on the popular podcast Serial.

“Adnan’s case is a mess. It’s a mess. That’s where we were when we stopped covering it in 2014,” Serial host Sarah Koenig said in her blunt, personal style in the new episode titled “Adnan’s Out.

In 2014, in a 12-episode series, Serial explored the details of the murder of Adnan Syed’s ex-girlfriend, Haimin Lee, who was found strangled in Baltimore’s Lakin Park in 1999.

Said was convicted of Lee’s murder in 2000, when he was 17 years old. He spent 23 years in prison. On Monday, in a Baltimore courtroom, a judge ruled to vacate his conviction.

In addition to having a huge impact on Said’s case and exposing the flaws in the legal system, the podcast breaks new ground in episodic audio storytelling.

Created and produced by Koenig and Julie Snyder, The Sequence is a spin-off of This American Life. The first season was downloaded some 300 million times, breaking podcast records and spawning a cottage industry of true crime podcasts. It won nearly every major journalism award, including the DuPont and Peabody Awards, the first ever given to a podcast. Koenig was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people of 2015.

Sarah Koenig receives her award at the 74th Annual Peabody Awards at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on May 31, 2015.

Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, learned about Serial from his children. at the time, podcasting was experiencing something of a generational divide. He credits persistent reporting, a reliance on experts and propulsive storytelling as key to its success.

He says Koenig’s way of connecting listeners to Serial’s reporting made for great listening
tasty.” One of the intriguing parts of Serial’s podcast is that everyone gets to hear her thought process out loud,” Sheikh says, “and that’s part of the appeal of it. You know, we’re all trying to think together, is he innocent? Is he guilty?”

With that story came the discussion it sparked. In the case of Serial, they are tied together.

The serial phenomenon is not just about trying to solve the crime itself. It’s also about vast communities devouring each episode and then picking it apart online. The Atlantic’s reporters wrote about it on their blog. A place to discuss Serial. the podcast on Reddit reached 72 million members.

As Christopher Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, marveled in 2015, Serial “has unleashed a fierce and wide-ranging civil rights debate on the Internet,” he wrote.” Most importantly, tens of thousands of people commented on Reddit, a hugely popular discussion forum among young people, as they debated and investigated various aspects of the case, many of which were not covered by the podcast.”

The idea to delve into Saeed’s case originated with Rabia Chaudhry, a lawyer and one of Saeed’s friends and supporters. She pitched the idea to Koenig. As the “serial” unfolded, Chaudhry blogged about each episode, sharing what she learned about the case and complaining about the way she thought the producers handled the story.

Chaudhry was also struck by how her point of view became part of the narrative.” I realized that while I and others close to Adnan were deeply involved in the minutiae of the case and the show, we were a part of the case and the show, a part of the public. Our interactions online were discussed, we were judged and evaluated, and we added entertainment and substantive value to the discussion. We are also characters in this larger story,” she writes.

Chaudhry continues to write her book and produces a podcast about Said. She is also the executive producer of the four-part HBO documentary “The Case of Adnan Syed.

While Sheikh is happy to see all the other true crime podcasts Serial has inspired, he urges caution for those who think it’s easy to do it well.

“It’s one thing to own a podcast and try to tell a story. It’s another thing to get into the business of exposing wrongful convictions,” he said.

Serial benefits from a team that knows what they don’t know, Scheck said.
“The great thing about Serial is that they don’t make any pretense every time,” Scheck said.” They try to turn to investigators, they try to turn to experts. They rely on the audience to provide clues. They do it in a very professional way.

“To say it’s addictive is an understatement,” Scottish actor Ewan McGregor wrote for Sarah Koenig in Time magazine’s Most Influential People entry.” Suddenly, investigative journalism became our hobby, our passion. Everywhere you went people were talking about it. It’s a real cultural phenomenon.”

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