Original subtitles

Finally, tonight, the podcast rises again.

Business is booming as technology has made it easier to listen,

and one program in particular, has turned into an unexpected phenomenon in recent weeks.

Harris Renavossen gets the low down on the big surge in downloads.

For the last year, I've spent every working day trying to figure out

where a high school kid was for an hour after school one day in 1999.

That's just part of the hook of a weekly podcast called serial that's riveting.

millions and spawned fan clubs with its exploration

of a true murder case and felon's potential innocence.

it's serial. one story told week by week. i'm sarah Kaineg.

first released in October,

serial is a spinoff of the public radio program this american life.

each week the program's investigation of the case seems to unfold along with the listener.

the focus, the 1999 conviction of a high school senior named

Adnan Said who was charged with the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hey.

Lee, serial host and creator Sarah Kainig takes

listeners through an extensive re-examination of the alibis,

testimony, work of the defense attorney done back then,

asking whether Said really was guilty.

It's a huge hit in the world of podcasting,

garnering 5 million downloads iTunes, far more than any other podcast in history,

but the idea of a serial is as old as Charles Dickens,

who experienced wild success with the Pickwick papers in the mid-1800s.

This is spark cast for the week of May 12th,

the notion of podcasting stories has gained steam in recent years,

with popular ones such as this American life,

which has about million downloads a week, and planet money.

Less well-known ones draw smaller audiences, but still have substantial followings.

In fact, last year,

Apple reported that subscriptions to podcasts through itunes reached 1 billion.

Raw voice, which tracks 20,000 shows, said the number of unique monthly.

podcast listeners has tripled to 75 million from 25 million just five years ago.

we've only scratched the surface of the obsession some have with serial.

it's inspired fan clubs, academic and legal inquiries,

blogs and yes, more podcasts about the podcast.

david Haglin is a senior editor at Slate who edits its culture

blog and is a regular panelist on slate's podcast about serial,

so now we are having a TV conversation with a man who has a podcast about a podcast,

so why is there this fac?

nation with just one story. well, the story itself is gripping obviously.

anytime a murder goes, not unsolved, but but raises questions about who actually did it,

you people get interested, you get interested right away.

the fact that it was young woman, supposedly killed by an ex-boyfriend.

mean, there are sensational details that grip you.

but then top of that, podcasting is very intimate form,

and the producers of cereal and its host Saranig are masters at it.

when you listen to them, you feel like you're listening

to a friend talk to you with in great detail about the case,

and that's just gripping,

that brings it to you in a way that a TV show or a book might not.

and when you said intimacy, it made me think

of the fact that lot of us are now consuming audio here,

not even in the big room, right?

mean, or perhaps in the car, which is also semi-intimate space, you're by yourself,

um, does that play into why podcasting seems to be making a little bit of a comeback?

it definitely does. mean, for me, listen on uh my commute into Manhattan on the subway,

so I've got my headphones in and I see other people with their

headphones in and with Serial in particular given its popularity,

I'm sure some of them are listening to the same thing I am,

but we're each having our own solitary experience of communing with the story,

and I i said comeback I shouldn't have,

I mean podcasting has been around for quite some time,

uh, what is it that has recently made it more popular?

I mean, Apple said something about what a billion uh downloads of podcasts?

Well, it's getting easier and...

easier to download them, there are more apps,

just about everybody has a smartphone now, so you you can get a podcast very easily,

top of that it's becoming easier and easier to listen to podcast in your car,

and I think that's the next big wave,

I think not only are podcasts growing in popularity now,

but there's a huge surge uh in the near future,

I would say, so the replacing commercial radio as we know it in the car,

especially for those people are commuting every morning or every evening,

for lot of people, I mean I wouldn't want to overstate it yet,

more people listen to terrestrial radio certainly and podcast.

casting remains to some degree niche form, but i think that's about to change.

so what kind of podcasts are more successful than

others if you had to look across the entire spectrum?

well, lately podcasts like serial real,

intensely produced story podcasts are becoming more more and more popular.

uh, prior to that, comedy podcasts were huge,

and and i think the reason they hit first is because podcasting is very loose form,

it doesn't have to abide by time limits in the way that most radio shows do,

and so you can kind of let yourself.

go, and lot of panel shows are very popular as well,

for similar reasons, you can talk and talk, as far as the conversation takes you,

and then stop, and because it feels so intimate,

the people who are listening feel like they're part of the conversation.

speaking of the part of the conversation, especially around serial,

there's lots and lots of conversations in different online forums,

conspiracy theories galore, everyone has a theory about,

well who did it or was there misconduct by this person or that person?

why why do we get so into this narrative and almost like an interactive fashion?

well, i think nowadays when you can go online and go to a place like

Reddit for instance and commune with other people who are discussing the case,

you start to feel as though you'll get to the bottom of it,

and and lot of the documents related to the case are also available online,

so you can actually pour over the very things

that the producers themselves are looking at,

not all of them, but enough of them to make you think,

maybe if I look some more, I'll finally find the clue that they've missed.

Okay, is this leading to people discovering other podcasts?

I think it is, yeah, I mean, I was home for Thanksgiving recently,

and my younger brother told me he had just listened to a podcast for the first time,

and of course it was serial, and now that he's listened,

to that one, maybe he'll download another one,

maybe he'll get into the habit, I think that's...

for lot of people, all right, David,

senior editor at slate, thanks so much, thanks for having me.