Creating Serial

Serial is a podcast from the creators of This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig. Serial tells one story — a true story — over the course of a season. Serial has won every major award for broadcasting, including the duPont-Columbia, Scripps Howard, Edward R. Murrow, and the first-ever Peabody awarded to a podcast.

Sarah Koenig graduated from the University of Chicago in 1990 and began reporting for the East Hampton Star in New York. She worked for both ABC News and the New York Times in Russia, then covered State House politics for the Concord Monitor and the Baltimore Sun. In 2004 she became a producer on This American Life, winning a Peabody Award in 2006 for her work on “Habeas Schmabeas,” an episode covering Guantanamo detainees. In 2013 she began work on a spinoff from This American Life called Serial. The podcast, which first aired in 2014, was unusual both for its long-form, serialized reporting and for the fact that the producers and reporters continued to uncover new facts as the series went on, making it impossible to predict how the show would end.

Julie Snyder has been the guiding force behind two of the most successful ventures in audio broadcasting: she is the co-creator of the podcast Serial, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times, making it the most listened-to podcast in the history of the form; and for many years, she was the senior producer of the public radio show This American Life, which is heard by more than 4 million listeners each week.