At the top of the transcripts page for the third season of Serial, a favorite on numerous year-end podcast lists, is a warning: “Serial is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read.”
We read the transcripts anyway. And we discovered that while Serial is a podcast, reporter Sarah Koenig’s bold writing in the latest season, which follows a year in a Cleveland courthouse, offers valuable lessons for print journalists.
From the archives: Serial, Mystery Show, and why listeners want to be in on the investigation
Koenig is not constrained by the clunky traditions of print journalism—the apparatus of attribution and the awkward third-person-ness that many news organizations require. Instead, she…
