Speaking with: Serial’s Julie Snyder about making groundbreaking podcasts

SerialBy now almost everyone has heard – or heard of – This American Life’s blockbuster podcast series Serial. The first series, originally published in 2014, covered the incarceration and possible wrongful conviction of Adnan Syed for the murder of schoolgirl Hae Min Lee in Baltimore. In June this year Syed was granted a new trial for the murder, based at least partially on the renewed scrutiny of the case by the Serial team. So what does it take to make a podcast that has had over 243 million downloads over two series? What decisions have to be made about pacing, music, how to represent the real-life characters involved and the impact it will have on its subjects’ lives? And in a Trump-led post-truth world, what role can podcasting play to inform public conversations? The University of Wollongong’s Dr Siobhan McHugh (who was recently a consulting producer on Fairfax’s successful Phoebe’s Fall podcast) talks to Julie Snyder, Serial’s Executive Producer and co-creator, about the process of making a serialised audio documentary and its impact on its listeners, creators and subjects. Siobhan McHugh was consulting producer for the podcast Phoebe's Fall, from The Age newsroom, Melbourne, mentioned in the interview. She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council grant to make a radio documentary series about the relationships behind the production of Aboriginal art. She is the founding editor of RadioDoc Review, an online journal that critiques audio documentaries and podcasts (http://ro.uow.edu.au/rdr).