You could cite the sponsorship of Audible, the rise of Midroll Media, Gimlet and PRX’s Radiotopia, galvanizing events like Podcast Movement and the Third Coast International Audio Festival, but ask anyone and they will say that it was Serial and its 100 million downloads that elevated narrative-driven podcasting from dorky obscurity back in 2014. Serial was mainstream. Serial intensified and also transcended the This American Life aesthetic. Serial was serious.

It also clarified the affect surrounding its own mode of consumption. One did not merely follow Serial or like Serial in 2014; one was “obsessed” with Serial. It’s the word that came up most often in the coverage, and served as grist for ridicule and derivative works, of which there are now many – Breakdown, Another Dead Man Walking, Limetown. If TV has taken on the metaphor of substance abuse these days (we are “addicted” to Making a Murderer, we “binge” on Scandal), narrative-driven podcasting has taken on the argot of infatuation, of compulsion, of love.

That response was prompted by the podcast itself. Early in the first episode, there is a bit of theater when Sarah Koenig reflects on how a meeting with lawyer Rabia Chaudry prompted her investigation of the murder of Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee and the issue of whether or not Lee’s former boyfriend Adnan Syed had really committed it. In an aside, Koenig uses the technique of false improvisation, seeming to rethink a word in mid-sentence, although the line strikes the ear as scripted:

This conversation with Rabia […] this is what launched me on this year long – obsession is maybe too strong a word – let’s say fascination, with this case.

Let’s not. When this first aired, here on Antenna Jason Mittell made the argument that the main character of Serial wasn’t Syed at all, but Koenig herself. In retrospect I’d go further. Because the show dramatizes how engrossed its host became with the investigation she was performing, her obsession was the “protagonist” of the show. After all, that which drives Serial’s seriality is neither the chronology of the story nor that of its reconstruction, but Koenig’s internal thought process, her uncertainty when faced with multiple avenues of interpretation afforded by the same datum. Remember the Nisha Call, the pay phone at Best Buy, Syed stealing from the donations at his mosque? We listened to Koenig organize and reorganize each of these, value and devalue them, recursively, incredulously, passionately. We listened to Koenig struggling with the stubborn ambiguity of an ever-growing wall of details. That is why (as critics are starting to realize) imitating Serial’s narrative is impossible to do without recreating its narration.

So Serial’s thorniest philosophical problem was never with ethics, but instead with something closer to hermeneutics. The last lines of the twelfth episode speak to this theme:

When Rabia first told me about Adnan’s case, certainty, one way or the other seemed so attainable. We just needed to get the right documents, spend enough time, talk to the right people, find his alibi. Then I did find Asia, and she was real and she remembered and we all thought “how hard could this possibly be? We just have to keep going.” Now, more than a year later, I feel like shaking everyone by the shoulders like an aggravated cop. Don’t tell me Adnan’s a nice guy, don’t tell me Jay was scared, don’t tell me who might have made some five second phone call. Just tell me the facts ma’am, because we didn’t have them fifteen years ago and we still don’t have them now.

In an ironic touch, Koenig cites detective Joe “Just the Facts” Friday of Dragnet, radio’s paragon of positivist “keeping going,” as she expresses skepticism about the certainty that such a method provides. What was at stake in Koenig’s obsession, ultimately, wasn’t her feelings towards Adnan (the allegation of romantic attachment strikes me as both unsupported and misogynistic) but her worry that certainty about him is unavailable. What if the truth isn’t out there? That is the fear to which Koenig was professionally and emotionally vulnerable, and by foregrounding that exposure rather than subordinating it, she gave the show dimension, made it special and weird.

Last month Serial returned, now with seven new staff members and a host of collaborators, including Mark Boal’s Page One film company, tackling an elusive subject: the disappearance and search for Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier who left his post in Afghanistan one night in June 2009 and was returned after a prisoner swap five years later.

The topic is complex, but in adopting it Koenig also marginalizes her own voice. We hear little about her own thinking, opinions, epistemological struggles. The first episode ends dramatically, with a phone ringing and Koenig explaining “That’s me, calling the Taliban.” But this is almost the only moment of personal ownership in the episode. By contrast, the first installment of Season 1 was full of that:

… This search sometimes feels undignified on my part …
… I have to know if Adnan really was in the library at 2:36 PM …
… If you’re wondering why I went so nuts on this story versus some other murder case, the best I can explain is this is the one that came to me …

In the Season 1 launch she uses the object pronoun form “me” 14 times to refer to herself. In the launch of Season 2 she only uses it four times.

She’s an outsider, learning terminology as we do and drawing on others. A recent article in Vulture characterizes Koenig as a novice in national security, describing Boal as the “embed” with contacts in government and a background as a screenwriter for films like Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. In its very structure, then, Season 2 turns away from the model of the heroic individual quest, of “dramatic nonfiction narrative in the form of a personal journey” as Eugenia Williamson characterizes the This American Life aesthetic, and toward a model of collaboration. No doubt many journalists will cheer this change.

The team is making use of all of its resources. “The Golden Chicken,” the second episode, draws on 12 interviewees from Bergdahl’s battalion, 25 hours of taped conversations between Boal and Bergdahl, an interview with Taliban leader Mujahid Rehman, reporting by Afghan Sami Yousafzai who made contact with a fighter named Hilal, as well as documents from Wikileaks, all to reconstruct what happened to Bowe in the first weeks of captivity. If Serial’s new season is “about the knotted relationship between systems and people,” as Slate’s Katy Waldman puts it, then it also requires a number of systems and people to explore it.

Like the first season, this one dwells on discrepancies. The Taliban say that they did a traditional attan dance to cheer up Bergdahl in an orchard during his transportation, but he remembers nothing like that. Like last time, the heart of the show lies in interview tapes peppered with humdrum audio, like the sounds of Boal microwaving his lunch, which contrast the network news snippets at the top of the program – what Koenig calls the “antiseptic upstairs realm” of the mass media narrative. Like the first season, this one often focuses on vivid details. In the third episode, we learn that Taliban fighters drink Mountain Dew, think sunglasses look cool, and say “What’s up, bro.” The first episode explains what life was like in Bergdahl’s station in Paktika province by focusing on the burn pit, where pitiable soldiers took turns stirring their own burning refuse. It’s a shit-stirring scene at a post made famous by a soldier trying to stir up shit.

In theory, there is no reason why the new season, with its dark humor, with its war and torture, with its humanized subject and investigators, should differ tonally from the previous one. Koenig clearly has sympathy for her subject – in the fourth episode, listen to her describe how a captor cuts Bergdahl’s chest slowly with a razor blade 600 times. With multiple accounts of these and other events, the same awe and uncertainty we experienced the first time should plague us. “Any one piece of this story can keep a person’s mind churning,” Koenig promises in an early passage.

And yet it doesn’t. Why? Because Koenig is not vulnerable to her story this time out; she tells the story without becoming a character in it. She has yet to speak to Bergdahl directly, and her retreat to the role of anchor bears the same antiseptic whiff as the TV media reports that the program borrows for its opening. We aren’t even following Koenig’s “mental churning” closely enough to know how fraught it might be. Without the pathos of a narrator’s affective relation to her narrative, the season comes across as superior journalism but inferior meta journalism. We’ve lost the innervating anxiety that made it special.

Just think of it at the level of sonic texture. Gone are the calls to Adnan, car rides with co-producers, footsteps into fields, knocks on doors, auditory situations in which we felt physically proximal to our host moving through space over a duration of time. Instead, Koenig speaks to us from nowhere in particular, pointing our ears at places rather than taking us along with her to visit them. Her intense intimacy with the audience is not mirrored by a similar sonic proximity to the people and places that the story is about, leaving the experience oddly hollow, even lonely.

Perhaps Season 2 is too far away from its focus. Obsession always implies a collapse of critical distance, but Serial’s own metaphors go the other way. Early on in the first episode, Koenig likens the Bergdahl story to a children’s book called Zoom.

It starts with these pointy red shapes. And then, next page, you realize those shapes are a rooster’s comb. Next page, you zoom out, you see the rooster is standing on a fence with two little kids watching him. Next page, zoom out again, they’re in a farmhouse. And then, zoom further, you realize that all of it — the rooster, the kids, the farmhouse — are toys being played with by another child […] Out and out it zooms, the aperture of the thing getting wider and wider until the original image is so far away it’s unseeable. That’s what the story of Bowe Bergdahl is like.

It’s what the podcast is like, too. Even as we get closer to the story, we seem further away.

This is not the only time that Koenig refers to children’s media. Earlier on in the episode, she contrasts Boal’s salty language with Bowe’s schoolboy politeness, noting that the latter’s go-to expletive is Charlie Brown’s “good grief.” During the second episode, Koenig describes the Army’s thinking once it knew Bergdahl was captured this way:

They also knew that the Taliban’s goal would be to get Bowe to a hideout in the tribal region of Western Pakistan, because Pakistan is like home base. Or, to put it in Tom and Jerry terms, Pakistan is the hole in the baseboard where Tom cannot go.

Finally, in the third episode, as Koenig narrates the nightmarish tale of one of Bergdahl’s escape attempts. As Bergdahl falls off a cliff, the scene takes on the language of the comic strip:

Bowe lands on a dry riverbed on his left side. He said the word “oof” actually came out of his mouth, just like in a cartoon, loud enough so that some dogs started barking their heads off.

Small wonder that Serial feels just as bracing this time around, but flatter. Adnan Syed was a cipher; Bowe Bergdahl is a sketch.

And so, a year later, Serial remains the best game in town, an ambitious program, dense and with the best narrative rhythm in American narrative audio. It still boldly leads the field when it comes to signaling what podcasts can do. But it has lost its touch when it comes to refashioning how podcasts can feel. Is it fascinating? Sure. But so far obsession remains too strong a word.

Post by Neil Verma, Northwestern University

In her 2013 book Listening Publics, Kate Lacey points out a contradiction in listening habits arising out of the proliferation of podcasts and other programs born in the digital space. On the one hand, listeners experience radio in perhaps more personalized ways than they did in the past, listening to what they want and when they want, often in the micro-airspace of a personal device. On the other hand, these same listeners represent their acts of listening to others through social media much more readily and broadly than did listeners in the past (p. 154).

Our listening acts are thus simultaneously both less “in public” and more so, while becoming far more available to monitoring by a variety of entities clamoring for every crumb of data on audience preferences and behaviors.

The good news is that this contradiction suggests that despite the insularity of their sonic lives, there remains a persistent desire within many people to listen together, if only virtually. Lacey points to the rise of curated listening events, which have expanded quite a bit in the years since her book was published. Note the upcoming Cast Party bringing podcast shows to film theaters, recent RadioLoveFest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the ongoing events of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Although it’s not really new, listening together without visual stimulus still feels unusual, like an experiment in experience. By liberating publics and concentrating them, providing a paradoxical collectivity and anti-sociality at once, group podcast listening is full of possibilities, although it is unclear what they are and how to harness them.

Poster for the RadioLoveFest live radio series at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In this post, I’d like to think about the classroom as a space in which to find out more about that. While we have opportunities to use public and virtual spaces to promote collective listening (this was the premise of my #WOTW75 project in 2013), and some of the most experimental thinking about podcasting is taking place online (see Sounding Out!’s Everything Sounds piece, Cynthia Meyers’s study of podcast business, and Jason Mittell’s coverage of Serial), it’s in classrooms where we can really “do” collective listening in a unique way. Unlike listeners in online groups, movie theaters, museums, and festivals, those in classrooms host critique without seeming to undermine community. Moreover, they benefit from a tremendous power that even educators themselves often undervalue: by meeting again and again, classroom listening enables conversations to grow, as the listening we do alone becomes the listening we do together.

According to this reasoning, teaching classes on podcasting isn’t just a new idea to attract students – although it does – but also a way of knowing the form of the podcast anew. In other words, podagogy (a word I didn’t make up, swear) is just as necessary to the current task of inventing podcast studies as it is to the task of applying it.

I recently had a chance to experiment with this in a course I taught on “Podcasting and New Audio,” which focused on narrative-driven podcasts in historical context. Broken into three sections – “What is a Podcast?,” “Possible Histories the Podcast,” and “Formal Problems / Critical Strategies” – the course gave opportunities for complicating student understanding of shows that many already knew well. By teaching Radiolab’s “Space” alongside a week on the history of sound art, for instance, we could rethink this show on discovery along lines suggested by conceptual art. Combining Serial with Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the history of conjecture, we dug into the show’s hermeneutics, considering the way the narration approaches “evidence” with boundless suspicion while also providing listeners with sonic details that work as “clues,” offering seemingly privileged windows into meaning, like tracks in the snow.

I found the historical classes – highlighting the hidden legacy of radio drama, documentary, and the radio “feature” on podcast formulas – especially gratifying. Even the most ardent podcast fans know few masterpieces of the past. Want to blow the mind of a lifelong devotee of This American Life? Assign The Ballad of John Axon. Trust me.

Cover for a 1965 LP edition of The Ballad of John Axon by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker.

I added two podagogical (there it is again) features to the architecture of the class, both of which involved listening to our materials as a collective, in the room.

In the first, I asked students to work in groups to produce recordings as responses to the reading, creating a quasi-podcast of their own. Prompts included: after reading Nancy Updike’s manifesto for radio, create a 1 minute “manifesto” using only sound (I got a great one based on Russolo); provide the shortest possible piece of audio that tells a “story” whose structure responds to how podcasters like Alex Blumberg and Ira Glass understand that term (the snap of a mousetrap, two seconds flat). Listening to these in class gave each group a chance to talk about their thinking, emphasizing sound as not just a vehicle of response but also as a way of knowing. Indeed, the very anticipation of being asked to create audio made them listen differently, tuning their receptors and making them as detail-oriented in the study of podcasts as many already are when it comes to TV and film.

That’s the same idea behind the second experiment in the course. In each meeting, one group would take the task of devising and leading a “Guided Exercise in Collective Listening.” To explain, I gave an example. On the first day, I broke the group into thirds and assigned them each one of Michel Chion’s “Three Listening Modes” (semantic listening for language, causal listening for sources of emanation, “pure listening” for sound objects) to shape how they listen to The Truth’s “The Extractor.” Then we listened to the whole piece and had a discussion about how it was different depending on our mode, and what points in the piece cued us to shift from one mode to another. In another case, I instructed them to make a four frame “storyboard” for Sean Borodale’s A Mighty Beast while we listened to it together, later asking what choices we have to make in “translating” from sound to a constrained number of visuals, as a way of troubling our lazy notions of the relationship between sounds and mental images.

Soon the students took over directing our listening activities. That became the richest part of the course, particularly for difficult episodes. Listening to Love + Radio’s brilliant but disturbing story “Jack and Ellen” encouraged us to look at how editing constructed the complex reliability – and the complex gender identity – of a blackmailer. A group that undertook Radiolab’s controversial “Yellow Rain” segment instructed us to listen for moments of shifting allegiance, an idea that sharpened our appreciation of the rhetorical use of silence in that piece, along with its bearing on questions of race and power.

Art from the “Jack and Ellen” episode of Love + Radio. Image: Cal Tabuena-Frolli.

Another value of listening together in class was more ineffable. Getting podagogy out of the pod, it became clear that these pieces simply hang in the air differently among other people than they do in the ear and alone, carrying discomfort, mortification and identity more heavily when they fill a room. By having both experiences, class listening introduces sequence to Lacey’s contradiction. Students begin with private listening on their own, have a second experience informed by peers as a group, and then explain their experiences and their discrepancies to one another. The rhythm moved from the public to the private and back again, something that a one-time collective listening event alone does not accomplish.

Curated listening in public is a laudable and exciting development, I hope we see more of it. I hope it gets even weirder. But in the classroom, collective listening can be a way of teaching the ear to be more critical, more aware of its own comportment and aesthetic responses, as well as of the habits of attention and social dynamics that underlie those responses, the very matters that podcast scholarship ought to be after.

As with its cultural presence, the SCMS program reflects a catholic view of radio. A decade ago, the relatively few radio papers primarily addressed network era radio, the contemporary renaissance in radio scholarship addresses historical work from a variety of periods, transmedia adaptation, contemporary broadcast and satellite-based practices, as well as related practices like podcasts and web-streaming services. Now in its third year, the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group continues to offer community and mentorship for radio studies scholars new to SCMS or to the profession. The following consists of a list of explicitly radio oriented papers, workshops, and presentations. If one has a larger frame, presentations under the rubric of “Sound Studies” can be found in a roundup on the Sound Studies Blog.

Wed, 10:00 A10 Lindsay Affleck “Richard Diamond as Radio Shamus.”

Wed, 4:00 D18 Panel on “Podcasting: A Decade into the Life of a ‘New’ Medium”
Brian Fateaux on “Satellite Radio and the Aesthetics of Podcasting”
Andrews Salvati, “”Historiography and Interactivity in Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History”
Kelli Marshal, “Transmedia Storytime with your host Marc Maron”

Thursday, 11:00 G5 Panel on “Intermedial Adaptations of War of the Worlds”
Gabriel Paletz “Book to Broadcast and across Media: Orson Welles’s Strategies of Adaptation”
Doron Galili “War of the Worlds, Mass Media Panic, and the Coming of Television”
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman ““Invading Auditory Practice: On the War of the Worlds and #WOTW75”

Thursday 11:00 G21 Workshop on “Sound Work: Radio Production Cultures” with Shawn VanCour, Tom McCourt, and David Uskovich. Moderated by Antenna’s own Andrew Bottomley

Friday 9:00 K 22 Jennie Hirsh, “Transmissions of Fascism: Advertising Architecture through the Ente Radio Rurale Poster Campaign”

Friday 2:15 M8 Workshop on “The Problem of the Radio Canon” with Debra Rae Cohen, Bill Kirkpatrick, Kate Lacey, Jason Loviglio, and Elena Razlogova

Saturday 9:00 Radio Studies SIG Meeting! Special presentation Mira Burt-Wintonick producer of CBC’s WireTap and award winning audio documentary Muriel’s Message. She will present on “storytelling and sound design in the golden age of podcasting.” As my SIG co-chair Cynthia Myers describes it: “Part listening party, part discussion, this session aims to explore a variety of new sonic trends and possibilities in radio production. How do you make your stories stand out in a sea of audio content? What’s different about producing for radio vs. podcasts? How do you create a signature sound?”

Saturday 11:00 O7 Panel on “The Public Good Goes to Market”
Jason Loviglio, “NPR Listens: Psychographics, Audience Measurement, and the Privatization of Public Service Radio”
Christopher Cwynar, “Social Service Media?: Assessing the CBC and NPR’s Engagement with Social Media Platforms”

Saturday 11:00 O11 Panel on “Local and National Radio in ‘the long 1960s’”
Josh Glick “Soundscapes of South Los Angeles: Radio and the Voices of Resistance”
Darrell Newton, “Being of Color in Britain: Identity, 1960s Radio, and West Indian Immigration”
Eleanor Patterson, “We Are Not Reviving a Ghost: Reconfiguring Radio Drama in Post-network Era United States”
Alexander Russo, “Musical Storytelling to a Fragmented Nation: American Top 40 and Cultural Conflict”

Saturday 1:00 Panel on “Gender and Crossover Programming in the 1940s and 1950s”
Elana Levine, “Picturing Soap Opera: Daytime Serials and the Transition from Radio to Television”
Jennifer Wang, “Resuscitating The Wife Saver: Gender, Genre, and Commercialism in Postwar Broadcasting”
Jennifer Lynn Jones, “Signal Size: Gender, Ethnicity, and Diet Episodes in the Radio-TV Transition”
Kate Newbold, “‘Now The Booing Is Done in Soprano’: Wrestling, Female Audiences, and Discourses of Liveness in the Radio- to-TV Transition in America, 1940–1953”

Saturday 1:00 P10 Panel on “Historicizing Music and Transmedia”
Kyle Barnett, “Popular Music Celebrity, Jazz-age Media Convergence, and Depression-era Transmedia”
Kevin John Bozelka, “Everything on the Pig but the Squeal: Artist/ Publishers and Recordings in the Post-WWII American Entertainment Industry”
Landon Palmer, “All Together Now: The Beatles, United Artists, and Transmedia Conglomeration”
Alyxandra Vesey, “Mixing in Feminism: Playlists, Networks, and Counterpublics”

Saturday 1:00 P12 Morgan Sea of Tranzister Radio will be on a “Workshop on Trans Women’s Media Activism”

Saturday 5:00 R7 Panel on “Humor Across Media in the 1920s and 1930s”
Kathy Fuller-Seeley, “Becoming Benny: Jack Benny’s Production of a Radio Comedy Persona, 1932–1936”
Nicholas Sammond, “Extending the Color Line: The Intermedial Lives of Two Black Crows”

Sunday 11:00 T13 Roger Almendarez, “Radio Arte—The Formation of a Mediated, Local Latina/o Identity in Chicago’s Pilsen Neighborhood”

Sunday 1:00 U18 Peter Bloom “Learning the Speech of Counterinsurgency as National Allegory: BBC Radio and Instructional Propaganda Film during the Malayan Emergency”

This 1938 trade press article argues that choosing the announcer to voice the commercial is similar to choosing the correct typeface for a print ad.

As podcasters draw larger audiences, they are experimenting with business models, especially with advertising.

Like many media historians, I’ve been struck by the parallels between 1920s-30s radio and 2010s podcasting. Despite obvious differences between podcasting and early radio—such as asynchronous reception, niche rather than mass audiences, global rather than local distribution—podcasters hoping to support themselves by advertising share many of the opportunities and difficulties faced by the producers of Jack Benny and Kraft Music Hall.

When radio emerged in the 1920s, its boosters promised it would be an effective advertising medium because, instead of inert printed text, it used the human voice, which “tug[s] at heartstrings,” according to Radio Showmanship, and “affects the heart, mind, and soul,” according to a 1929 CBS pamphlet. Podcaster Alix Spiegel (Invisibilia) has recently made a similar claim about the emotional information carried in voices.

Early radio advertising proponents noted that audiences experienced radio as individuals rather than as masses, in the intimacy and privacy of the home, making it feel like a more confidential and personalized medium than, say, films in theaters. Likewise, some podcasters today note the high “engagement” they enjoy with their audiences, many of whom, listening on headphones or earbuds, are far more attentive than audiences for whom radio or television is sonic wallpaper. Advertisers who fear television audiences have strayed to other screens may find podcast audiences more appealing. As one podcaster explains, “People really pay attention to the ads,” so advertisers may pay very high prices (CPMs) to reach them.

The cartoonist H. T. Webster poked fun at announcers perfecting their commercial delivery.

Early radio proponents, such as a NBC time salesman, noted radio’s “pseudo-friendship” effect, when audiences’ parasocial relationships with radio personalities spilled over into their perceptions of whichever products those personalities endorsed. Likewise, some podcasters today, such as Mark Maron and the hosts of Men in Blazers, are asked by advertisers to promote products by integrating endorsements or uses of products into their podcasts, allowing brands to leverage the audience’s good will toward the host. Such “testimonials,” an established strategy in print advertising before the radio era, also had a long history in radio and television, as hosts such as Mary Margaret McBride and Arthur Godfrey integrated product endorsements into their talk shows.

However, advertisers do run some risks when closely tying the commercial message to the host or announcer’s personality. In early radio, some suggested that announcers delivering advertising messages must sound “sincere” or risk losing audience trust. The commercial’s words, according to Norman Brokenshire, a well-known announcer, must be “felt as well as spoken.” Likewise, StartUp podcaster Alex Blumberg, who uses first-person narratives and interviews in both his program and advertising, has insisted that he selects his advertisers carefully so that any implied endorsement by him is sincere and authentic.

In the 1930s the ad agency J. Walter Thompson would sometimes, instead of professional announcers, have an amateur or “man on the street” speak the commercial message; this, the ad agents believed, could make the advertising sound “more sincere, frank, and open.” Likewise, podcaster Roman Mars (99% Invisible) often uses soundbites of his own child speaking about his advertisers, and the producers of Serial, most famously, use “man on the street” interviews for their commercial for MailChimp. The interviewee who notoriously mispronounced the name as “Mail Kimp” reinforced the authenticity of the ad.

In 1920s radio, producers worried at first that audiences would turn off the radio if the program were interrupted by ads. Today audiences can easily avoid interruptive ads, and so podcasters feel a special need to keep them listening. Blumberg’s ads in StartUp, for example, resemble the rest of the show; as he interviews his documentary sources about his topic, so he interviews his sponsors about their business, with no change in style or tone. The similarity is so close, in fact, that he employs a special music cue so that listeners won’t confuse the ad with the program.

This integration of format or style between program and commercial was routine in 1930s-40s radio. Comedian Fred Allen made jokes with announcers about sponsors, and Jack Benny famously integrated humorous references to Jell-O into his comedy. The intention was not to confuse audiences but to smooth out any disjunctures and keep audiences listening.

Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media & the StartUp podcast (Image: The Wolf Den/Midroll Media)

Blumberg has already confronted one of the pitfalls of such integrations. For his company’s other program, Reply All, the producer used an interview with a young boy about his use of the web site provider Squarespace as an advertisement for that site. The boy, and his mother, thought the interview was for the program, not an ad, and the mother’s sense of offense was rapidly transmitted via social media. In a perfectly reflexive and reflective episode about this event, Blumberg interviewed the mother, who noted that her son, unlike a hired performer, was offered no compensation for his testimonial. So Blumberg’s production of authentic ads via documentary-style soundbites has to gain the trust not just of the audience but also of the documentary subjects.

In some ways, then, podcasting is where radio was in the late 1920s, promising to be a new medium but like old media simultaneously. Advertisers’ need to reach attentive audiences has increased as audiences have been unshackled from linear media’s schedules and forced exposure to advertising. As podcasters try to monetize programming, maintaining their audiences’ trust and attention will be crucial to their success, and that, in turn, will depend in part on how they handle their advertising.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

… was more than a month ago. Why the delay? Partly it was personal circumstances: a dead hard drive, family commitments, end of the semester craziness. But more it was because I didn’t quite have enough to say to warrant an installment, as many of my thoughts were only partly formed, or contingent on how future Serial developments would play out before I wanted to commit to an analysis. My abiding sense that Serial itself was in flux as a cultural object made it difficult to write an analysis that could avoid its own wavering and uncertainty.

But now we are done, or at least the standard weekly release of the story of Adnan Syed on Serial has ended. His story is far from over, but the storytelling has stopped. And I’m left to reflect on what Serial was, and might have been, had it not been so wedded to its weekly release schedule and need to conclude before the holiday season kicks in. One of the most exciting elements of Serial is how it has seemed to be inventing its own structural conventions throughout its run, distinguishing itself from typical radio with variable episode lengths, and jumping onto the high wire act of simultaneously reporting and presenting astory. From the beginning, Sarah Koenig has said that we’ll be following along with her as she discovers the story, and that they did not know how exactly many episodes the first season would be. But the final month has felt like they were spinning their wheels, looking for material to structure each weekly episode (especially last week’s “Rumors” installment), even given the extra break for Thanksgiving, and finding ways to incorporate the miscellaneous new information that kept pouring in.

Despite its conclusive allusion to Dragnet, which made me smile, today’s final episode felt rather arbitrary, dictated by the desire to have a defined season of regular installments, and seemingly to avoid the counter-programming of Christmas and New Year’s. There is no resolution, with two court motions still in play but otherwise no change in Adnan’s status or compelling alternate suspects—the last minute identification of a serial killer felt underwhelming, making me yearn for an episode exploring that story and teasing out the many problems with that theory. Koenig ends by playing juror and acquitting Adnan, but even as bits of evidence may have swayed her opinions slightly throughout the series, I have no doubt that she has always held sufficient reasonable doubt. The ending of Serial, entitled “What We Know,” establishes that although we know a lot more about the case than when we began, the big picture is the same as established in the pilot: the prosecution’s case was not enough to warrant conviction, but no other explanation for Hae’s murder rises above the level of unsubstantiated speculation inappropriate for factual journalism.

I’ve been interested in how Serial draws upon conventions of serialized TV fiction, and there is no doubt that the podcast’s unprecedented popularity was fueled by those resonances. But in the end, I think those comparisons also highlight Serial’s greatest weaknesses. The producers fail to achieve the structural elegance that marks the best of serial storytelling, where each episode both stands on its own and as piece of a compelling larger whole. They tackled a genre of crime fiction where our expectations are always aimed at a revelation that will be satisfying and conclusive, answering the curiosity question of “what happened in the past?”, which is an unreasonable goal for an ongoing investigation to arrive at. They embraced a serialized form that has encouraged and even demanded forensic fandom to fill in the gaps between episodes, but did not account for how to deal with the ethics of fan investigation into an actual murder, and whether to integrate or ignore such fan practices. And by adopting the model of weekly episodes of a thematically unified season, they were forced to produce episodes without much new to say, and stop producing episodes before the story had finished unfolding.

None of these structural facets are essential aspects of a serialized podcast. Specifically, I wonder how Serial may have played out with a more flexible production and distribution schedule. There is no doubt that the weekly release creates a ritual of engagement that is hard to replicate, but after a few episodes establishing the hook, moving to a more sporadic release as motivated by the story and reporting could sustain that engagement. And why must the series end now, just because further weekly releases are untenable? Imagine that in two months you noticed there was a new episode of Serial waiting in your iTunes playlist, with an update on Adnan’s appeal, or an in-depth investigation into the possible guilt of Ronald Lee Moore. That would set Twitter ablaze, and renew interest in the series (and sustain engagement in anticipation of the next season). Unlike television or radio, there is no need for a podcast to follow regular schedules, as it can be updated and distributed more like software or blogposts. Fiction has long shaped crime stories to fit into the constraints of a book, a film, or serialized television—Serial has adopted those constraints for a new medium, rather than exploring how non-fiction audio might more radically reshape the serial form. Much has been said about how Serial’s success has made podcasting into a more legitimate and popular medium; I hope it can inspire more creative uses of the medium’s structure and serial possibilities.

I conclude here where I began as well—I think Serial is a remarkable achievement, and I found it truly compelling listening. And yet… I am left dismayed by the structural limitations it imposed upon itself, by the ethical considerations that it seemed unable to grapple with effectively, and the genre trouble stemming from marrying non-fiction content to fictional storytelling norms. I don’t find these flaws to be debilitating, or that my critiques are merely “concern trolling” (as I’ve been accused of doing). Instead, such dissatisfaction is the fuel that keeps me engaged—given the ongoing promise of seriality, we always hope for more, for different, and for better. While I doubt we’ll get more of Adnan’s story within Serial proper (although I assume there will be a This American Life episode in a few months following-up on the developing story), we will get another season. Hopefully Koenig and her team won’t try to recreate what worked this season, but rather explore a new story on its own terms, with new storytelling structures and less constrained possibilities for what podcasting may be. Regardless, I’ll be listening.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

I peered down the rabbit hole of Serial’s Reddit board. Today I want to explore it a little more, raising the question of how people listen to Serial.

For anyone reading this without a media studies background, this might seem like a secondary digression for a critical analysis of the podcast itself. But one of the tenets of media studies is that any text (like a film or podcast) only matters through its consumption and cultural circulation. And I contend that a serialized text’s reception is even more essential, as the timeframe of production, consumption, and circulation is intertwined, and the gaps between episodes generate far more cultural material about the series than typically occurs in a self-contained text. Thus how we listen helps shape what it is.

Right now, how people are listening to Serial is the most interesting facet of Serial to me. This is not to say the last two episodes aren’t interesting—they definitely are, both in laying out the case against Adnan last week, and this week confirming my own sense that the case left “mountains of reasonable doubt” according to the experts in the law clinic. But together they feel like a transitional moment in Serial, moving from the first wave of establishing the facts as presented in trial, to the process of pushing back against that conviction and proposing alternate narratives. After all, we’re given a key clue as to where this might be going in this last episode: “As a legal question, Deirdre says they should only have to prove Adnan isn’t their guy, he’s not the killer. But as a practical matter, she said, their chances are much better if they can go a step further, and say to the state, ‘not only is this not your guy, we can tell you who is your guy.’” I assume Sarah Koenig says this knowing full well that offering a compelling case for an alternative perpetrator plays much better not only as a legal matter, but as a non-fiction narrative too. Whether that will be Jay, as teased for next episode, or someone else is still to be determined.

But one place where such questions are already being explored are on Serial’s many paratexts. The Reddit board is thriving, with more than 7,000 subscribers (and rapidly growing) and constant chatter between episodes. Slate started tackling Serial on their “Spoiler Special” podcast after the fifth episode, and they have now created a dedicated “Serial Spoiler Special” podcast that now ranks #7 on iTunes (Serial itself is #1). Serial is a popular topic on Twitter and many culture-centered websites, generating copious conversation and analytical attention. There is even a parody series, a sure sign of cultural importance in this day and age. What most interests me is how these paratextual practices fit with norms that have been well established over the past two decades for fans of fictional television series. I mentioned this briefly last post, with Reddit fans creating timelines, but it deserves more consideration.

As I have analyzed elsewhere, fictional television viewers have embraced forensic fandom for many series to try to parse out what is happening in a program and speculate what is still to come. Often times this involves gathering together evidence from interviews with producers, subtle clues within a series like freeze-frame images or intertextual references, and exploring official paratexts that point to broader contexts. Serial fans are doing all of these things, but with the added dimension that they are researching a non-fiction story, with much of the material in the public record. This creates a very strange differential of knowledge: some listeners want to only know what has been shared in the podcast (but still want to discuss that material and often ache with anticipation for the next episode), while others are looking into other sources of information, creating what we might think of as “reality spoilers” (in Myles McNutt’s phrase, as coined in a Twitter conversation).

As with spoilers of fictional series, the reasons why someone might seek to be spoiled are wide-ranging, including wanting to short-circuit anticipation, focusing more on how a story is told rather than what will happen, and hoping to thwart the producers. In the case of Serial, it seems that the nonfiction nature of the story, with much of the “action” occurring in the past, inspires forensic fans to do their own investigations into the case largely because that story information did not emerge from the creative impulses of producers—knowing that there are trial documents and news reports out there makes them irresistible paratexts for some listeners. In this way, fans become parallel investigators to Koenig, and I’m sure some of them are motivated by the competitive drive to “scoop” or at least equal the journalists. Of course, we have seen many cases in recent years of the dangers of online communities trying to be amateur cops, as with the wrongful accusations in the Boston Marathon bombing case and others; there have been ethical discussions on the Reddit board as to what information is appropriate to share versus withhold, given the potential recriminations that being linked to the murder might bring (as discussed in this Guardian piece on the fan phenomenon). And even parties who know more about the case can be respectful of Koenig’s storytelling imperatives to avoid spoilers, as with the fascinating blog of Rabia Chaudry, the lawyer who first brought the case to Koenig’s attention—she fleshes out lots of details and perspectives, but always in deference to Serial’s sequence of revelations.

Another key element of the forensic fandom involves the operational aesthetic, the focus on how a story is being told. As I’ve argued, this is a key element of contemporary serial television, both in fiction and reality television, and such attention to the mechanics of Serial’s storytelling are a central concern of both Slate’s podcast and the fan discussions. People parse out why Koenig makes the choices she does, what she’s omitting and including (like last names of key figures like Jay vs. Jenn), and the strategies the series seems to be following. The type of analysis I’m offering here on Antenna is widespread, both among the Redditors and journalists covering the series, as there seems to be an intense focus on where Serial is going and how it is being put together.

In thinking through the fan reaction and forensic attention the series has gotten, I’ve come to one conclusion: the ending of Serial will be regarded as a disappointment for a large number of listeners. As brought up by Cynthia Myers and Mike Newman in a Twitter conversation, Serial invites comparison to The Thin Blue Line, but it seems unlikely that the series ends with Adnan’s conviction being overturned. As Koenig has reasserted numerous times, she is still reporting the case (and seemingly the Innocence Project is also still working on it), and she doesn’t know where it will end. If fans are bringing expectations from well-crafted serial fiction, an ending that doesn’t resolve neatly or conclusively would seem to violate its assumed arc. Even the best fictional series rarely nail their endings, as expectations are too high and varied to please most viewers. Given that Serial’s ending is still a moving target, it’s hard to imagine how it will resolve in a manner sufficiently satisfying to match its hype. (This point is made more expansively and eloquently by NPR’s Linda Holmes, in a piece I read after drafting my column.)

And yet, even knowing that a satisfying ending is unlikely, and that elements of the reporting fill me with discomfort for rehashing a girl’s murder to prompt fans to debate the entertainment value of the series, I still listen, read, and write about Serial. What’s the draw of this format, this series, and this story? Next time, on “Downloading Serial”…

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

I raised the concern that information was being withheld from us listeners to make for a more engaging narrative, and suggested that such withholding makes for great storytelling, but problematic journalism. After two more episodes, I’ve found that the question of withholding information has receded in my thoughts about Serial, replaced by another more complex (and I think interesting) question: when are we?

Before diving into the “when” of this question and tackling the topic of temporality, let me first ruminate on the “we”—who is being situated in Serial’s complex timeframes? Recent episodes have cemented my sense that Sarah Koenig is our protagonist and first-person narrator, and she is hailing us to join her in this story. Early in episode 4, Koenig makes this address clear: “If you want to figure out this case with me, now is the time to start paying close attention because we have arrived, along with the detectives, at the heart of the thing.” This moment stood out for me, evoking the kind of direct address common to 19^th century literature, the first golden age of seriality—it is Koenig saying “Dear Reader” to us, a phrase that Garrett Stewart frames as “the conscripted audience,” taking us into her confidence and accessing her subjectivity.

So Koenig is a surrogate for “we,” and like with most first-person narrators, we have access to her perspectives and experience, and lack access to anything beyond her knowledge. But she is also the text’s author, possessing a broader knowledge of the case than she is sharing with us—Koenig asks for our trust, assuring us that the details she leaves out (like the late night cell phone timeline) are irrelevant, and that loose threads (like the call to Nisha) will be addressed in due time. And still I cannot stop from wondering what she knows and isn’t sharing with us (yet). This tension is productive in fiction, as we wonder about the knowledge and perspective between narrator and author; in documentary, we are to assume there is none, or at least it is irrelevant.

But Serial relies on the tropes and styles of serialized fiction enough that I did start to think actively about that gap at one moment in episode 5: Koenig is driving and monologuing, deep in the weeds about reconstructing the post-murder timeline, and her fellow producer Dana Chivvis says, “There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib”; Koenig deadpans in reply, “Sometimes I think that Dana isn’t listening to me.” If this were fiction, I would seize this moment to explore the possibility of an unreliable narrator, where the investigator’s obsessions start overtaking her rationality and sense of perspective on the case, coloring our own attitudes and perceptions, with Chivvis signaling that we maybe shouldn’t listen to her so intently. Maybe that is what is happening, and the narration is clueing us in to Koenig’s growing immersion and personal involvement, but as of yet, her presentation seems to clearly earn our trust and confidence more than our doubts and reservations.

So if “we” are Koenig’s conscripted audience, riding alongside her as she works the case, when are we as the podcast unfurls? Temporality is central to any medium with a fixed presentational timeframe, as filmmakers, radio and television producers, and game designers all work to manage the temporal experience of audiences more than writers can do with the more variable process of reading. But serial structure is wholly defined by its timeframe, constituted by the gaps between installments that generate anticipation and insist on patience, where that time is used to think about, discuss, and participate in the web of textuality that seriality encourages—see for instance the robust Reddit thread about Serial, complete with fan-generated transcripts and timelines evocative of the “forensic fandom” I have studied concerning television serial fiction. So the consumption of a serial always foregrounds its “when” to some degree.

A listener-created timeline shows forensic fandom at work, but in the realm of actual forensics

Serial explicitly foregrounded its “when” this last episode, as Koenig works to walk us through the presumed timeline of Hae’s death and the alleged actions of Jay and Adnan. As she does this, the podcast constantly toggles between multiple timeframes: the possible events of January 13, 1999, the testimonies and interviews recorded throughout 1999 and 2000 as part of the investigation and trial, Koenig’s interviews with Adnan and others over the course of the last year, and the current weekly production of the podcast. This question of temporality is clearly on the mind of many listeners—Chivvis responds to listeners wanting to binge listen to the whole season by noting that they are still producing each week’s episode, thus “when you listen each week, the truth is that you’re actually not all that far behind us.” So we are situated at a similar “when” to the producers in terms of final product, but they are clearly far ahead of us in terms of the process of reporting, researching, and knowledge. (Chivvis’s post also highlights a dangling thread that I may pick up in a future installment, as I believe the rise of binge-watching in television via Netflix-style full-season releases actually removes the seriality from serial television, whereas Serial aggressively foregrounds its seriality. But that’s for another when…)

While I raised the question in my last post about the lack of clear structure, I feel like that structure is now becoming clearer. Each episode, aside from the first which has a more sprawling focus, takes a step forward in the basic timetable of the case: the relationship between Hae and Adnan before the murder, the discovery of Hae’s body, the police arresting Adnan, and now the reconstruction of the alleged events per the police’s case—next week is called “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” suggesting that the prosecution will soon rest. But the storytelling is not limited to this 1999 progression, as Koenig interweaves her own contemporary reporting, interviews, and reconstructions into the recordings and documents from the past. So we are always in multiple timelines, even as the core case unwinds with some structuring chronology. But given that we are left to live in the contemporary serial gaps each week, our anticipation becomes restless, knowing that the producers have more of the past spooled up to reveal, even if we are “actually not all that far behind” them in the present. I, for one, grow impatient to know what is already known about the past, even if we are not too far behind the process of audio reconstruction.**

So as I wait out another week to try in vain to catch up to the producers, one thing I will be ruminating on is the role of characters beyond Koenig. We are invested in learning the events of the murder and trial, but perhaps even more so, in trying to get a sense of who these people are and why they did what they did. Obviously we’ve learned a lot about Adnan, even without a definitive sense of what we know is true or not, but what about Jay? We still don’t know much about who he was before the events (not even his last name), and unlike nearly everyone else we’ve encountered, we know absolutely nothing about what has happened to him after the trial. Why haven’t they revealed that part of the story? Are they trying to protect potential twists in the story still to come, or to protect an innocent person who might be wrongly attacked by an angry listenership? Has Koenig talked to him, or has he not consented to this story? And what do we have the right to know as listeners riding alongside Koenig’s journey?

Next time, on “Downloading Serial”…

** And in a clear case of dueling authorial “whens,” after I finished the first draft of this post, I read Hanna Rosin’s excellent post about the latest episode, which raises many points similar to mine concerning Koenig’s role as narrator and journalist, as well as her timeframe in relation to the reporting process. But I assure you, Dear Reader, I wrote the above before reading Rosin, even as I write this addendum after.

I should preface this column by saying that I felt particularly hailed by Serial, the new hit podcast from the producers of This American Life. I have been an avid listener of TAL for more than a decade, shifting from weekly appointment radio to can’t-miss podcasts. I even remember the very first time I heard the program, as I was visiting a friend in Chicago in November 1998 and she suggested we tune in this fairly-new local public radio show on my car radio as we drove across the city—fortunately, the first story we heard was the unforgettable “Squirrel Cop,” so I was instantly hooked. Podcasts are my favorite thing to listen to while driving, mowing the lawn, or walking the dog, so it’s easy to fit a new one into my daily rhythms. And given that I have spent the last ten years focusing my academic research on understanding contemporary serial storytelling, this new podcast felt like it was made particularly for me.

And now that three episodes have “aired” (or whatever verb we use for a downloadable audio file), I think it’s great—each episode adds a new installment in the true crime tale of a high school murder in 1999 and the convicted killer who might very well be innocent. The structure maximizes intrigue as to what happened 15 years ago, and what might happen to potentially clear Adnan Syed from the murder charge. The production is as tight and smooth as TAL, making it sound like an established project that hits the ground running, rather than the typical startup choppiness of most new podcasts trying to establish a voice. So it’s definitely worth all the attention it’s been getting and you should certainly become a regular listener.

And yet…

I have some reservations that stem from its formal innovations. Serial’s titular use of seriality raises some interesting narrative wrinkles, as it applies the serial form to journalistic nonfiction in seemingly unique ways. There have certainly been journalistic series before, where a reporter stretches a story over multiple days or even weeks, but in such cases that I know of, it feels like the reporting is ongoing rather than segmenting a single story to maximize suspense and engagement. Likewise, documentaries like the 7 Up series or Paradise Lost’s sequels return to the story after new information or revelations develop during the serial gaps. And of course reality TV serializes nonfiction stories, but typically such narratives are contrived by design, rather than the high-stakes matters of murder and a life sentence. Serial producers report most of the story ahead of time, and serial their presentation of the material. (According to interviews, they are still producing episodes and doing more reporting as the podcast rolls out, but the bulk of the reporting was completed before launch.) And this creates some genre trouble.

Serial’s storytelling owes to other genres besides journalism, with an embedded murder mystery at its core. In exploring this murder, the program functions as a crime procedural, detailing investigations by both the police and the lead reporter, Sarah Koenig. In television, we tend to equate “procedural” with “episodic,” as the bulk of crime programs that highlight investigations focus on stand-alone cases each week in a tradition dating back to Dragnet. But the serialized procedural has emerged recently as a hybrid, tracing the investigative process over time on police dramas The Killing and Broadchurch (innovated importantly by Twin Peaks, which I recently conversed about on this very site). I’ve studied the use of the serial procedural model on The Wire, which dramatizes and serializes procedures not only for police, but also for drug dealers, unions, politicians, teachers, and reporters. This last one is the vital link to Serial, as The Wire creates an interesting intertext: Koenig, like Wire creator David Simon, was a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun before moving into electronic media, and this crime story takes place in Baltimore County. When I am visualizing the scenes described on Serial, I reference the visuals of The Wire to help set the milieu.

Koenig’s role is crucial here, as I would argue that she is the main character of Serial, and this is where my reservations emerge. Obviously there is the highly dramatic material around the murder case, but the podcast’s narrative arc is Koenig’s own process of discovery in investigating the case. The first episode highlights how she learned about the murder, why she began investigating, and her growing reservations about the conviction. I figured that we would trace her investigative process as it unfolds, providing the vector which the series would follow. However, the episodes are structured more topically, with each exploring a particular aspect of the case in depth—thus far we have delved into Adnan’s alibi, Hae and Adnan’s relationship, and the discovery of her body. This last episode raised my concerns about the podcast’s structure: the whole episode centers on “Mr. S” and his unusual stumbling across Hae’s body in Leakin Park (which is visited and referenced on The Wire as “where West Baltimore brings out its dead”). It’s an engaging episode with great twists—he’s a streaker?!—but I’m left wondering how it fits into the larger narrative arc. Is this just a red herring? Does it help us learn more about the core case of Adnan’s conviction, or is it just a colorful digression to flesh out the whole story? And most importantly, what does Koenig know when she’s presenting this facet of the story?

Since Koenig is both Serial’s lead character and the lead authorial figure (or more accurately, functions as the inferred author), her knowledge is crucial to our narrative comprehension. If we were following her process of discovery chronologically, we would share her amount of knowledge about the case—even though there would obviously be a delay in the production process so that the real person Koenig would know more than her radio character would in a given week, we would at least share a linear process of discovery with her. Instead, each episode compresses the discovery over the past year of reporting into a presentation of that aspect of the case. This is much easier to follow than the messy procedures of reporting, where she was certainly investigating multiple facets all at once and only could make sense of certain bits of evidence in retrospect. But by structuring it for both clarity and engagement, I feel like there is a bit of betrayal to the journalistic enterprise, as Koenig and her production team are seemingly presenting information that they know is not crucial to the case, or that later revelations will problematize.

What is their responsibility in telling us what they know upfront? As storytellers, withholding information about a story to maximize dramatic engagement is essential. As journalists, withholding crucial information about a story seems problematic at best, unethical at worst. This conundrum of narrative journalism is compounded by the serial form, as the structural need to withhold and defer story seems to run counter to the journalistic responsibility to inform listeners. While I do not think Serial aims to deceive or mislead us, it does strategically refuse to give us the full story—thus far, we have not been presented with any other viable suspects in the case, any exploration of the crucial witness Jay and his potential role in the crime, or considerations of alternative motives, all of which have been teased as still to come. And yet I assume that Koenig knew of such information and possibilities long before she investigated the burial scene and dived into Mr. S’s odd history. Such deferments make for truly compelling storytelling that I am enjoying, but they make me uncomfortable with the ethics of this format. I get frustrated that Koenig is keeping something from me, feeling like she’s not playing fair—even though I often feel similar frustration about a compelling serial fiction, that’s part of the game for fiction while it violates the rules of journalism. How will this strategy play out over the course of Serial’s many weeks? Will my feeling that information is being withheld get in the way of connecting with the shared experiences and conversations that makes TAL and other long-form audio journalism so powerful? Can I resist researching the case to discover yet-to-be-revealed details certainly lurking online as spoilers (a.k.a. real life)?

These issues are still to be resolved—and that is my motivating question for this series of commentaries on Serial. I’ll post to Antenna on a semi-regular basis (e.g. when I have something more to say), and analyze this new form of serialized audio journalism in terms of narrative, medium, and other issues as they arrive. I also hope to land an interview with Serial’s producers to get a sense of their own procedures and goals in crafting this experiment. Just as Serial represents a new form of serialized journalism, I’m going to try to serialize an essay about the series here, publicly drafting and revising arguments as the source material rolls out. Both are experiments with unpredictable ends. Stay tuned and join the conversation to discover where they might lead.