How South Florida’s Sun Sentinel created ‘Felonious Florida’
One day, two veteran news editors in South Florida spent their lunchtime talking about their favorite podcasts. True crime stories, like “Serial” and the Cincinnati Enquirer series “Accused,” fascinated Lisa Arthur and Juan Ortega.
Then, Ortega recounted, Arthur looked at him and said, “If you like them so much, why don’t we just do one?”
Today, the two Sun Sentinel journalists, amid daily work on hurricanes, an airport shooting and the fallout from the Parkland massacre, are behind what has suddenly become one of America’s top podcasts. Within eight hours of its release on April 3, “Felonious Florida,” focusing on a famous triple-killing in the 1990s, leaped to the top of the iTunes podcast charts. It stayed there for another eight days.
Neither Arthur nor Ortega had produced a podcast before. Neither had a supervising editor, nor the video editor and photo editor who worked as sound engineers, voice…
