JOURNALISTS are usually in the business of reporting the news, not making it. But over the past week, “Serial,” a prize-winning, top-rated, true crime podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig, played a starring role in a 5-day hearing that might give a murder convict a fresh chance to prove his innocence. In 2014, Ms Koenig, a journalist, became interested in the case of Adnan Syed, a 35-year-old man serving a life sentence for strangling his ex-girlfriend in 1999. Some details of Mr Syed’s trial in 2000 troubled Ms Koenig, and she spent over a year tracking down witnesses, traipsing around Baltimore, wading through trial transcripts and speaking to Mr Syed himself to try to get to the bottom of what happened to Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old student who disappeared and was found dead a month later in a desolate park on the outskirts of Baltimore.
“Serial” was a runaway hit, prompting more than 70 million downloads. Its success was fueled by Ms Koenig’s dogged investigative reporting, which unfolded in real time as her audience awaited new insights and clues every Thursday morning. In its 12 episodes, “Serial” examined the suspicious-sounding man who discovered Ms Lee’s body and questioned the story of the prosecution’s witness who says he helped Mr Syed bury his ex-girlfriend. Ms Koenig tested out the state’s timeline by driving the route Mr Syed was purported to have covered on the day of his crime. She explored whether anti-Muslim bias may have played a role in his trial. She sought out the analysis of the director of The Innocence Project, an organisation that uses DNA evidence to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted. And she got in touch with Asia McClain, a classmate of Mr Syed at Woodlawn High School who said she chatted with him in the school library at precisely the time prosecutors said he was killing Ms Lee.
