When journalist Sarah Koenig released “Serial,” a 12-episode podcast approximately a fifteen-12 months-old case concerning a murdered high school girl, she no longer most effectively revolutionized podcasting; she created binge-listening.
Downloaded more than 340 million times, “Serial” has become the first podcast to win the Peabody Award. It was the sort of storytelling that humans dissected at paintings over the proverbial water cooler. It was so popular; comedian Cecily Strong played Koenig in a “Saturday Night Live” skit, and HBO currently aired a three-part unique approximately the case.
But past the inherent drama and cliffhangers that include reporting a proper crime, that first season did something else: It stimulated Koenig to spend 12 months inner one courthouse to attempt to make sense of the Byzantine bureaucracy referred to as the USA justice system.
“I’ve been in and around courthouses in my profession. I’ve long gone into a courthouse to cover a certain case or profile a judge. I had in no way stepped back like this,” Koenig stated in a telephone interview from her Pennsylvania home with The Times of Israel.
Its third season has wrapped and is available for binge-listening. In its 9 episodes, listeners will locate Koenig and her co-reporter Emmanuel Dzotsi within the Cuyahoga County criminal courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio.
During the year they spent there, the pair interviewed judges, police, social workers, attorneys, defendants, and sufferers. The myriad instances they followed included bar combat, pressure via capturing, and a marijuana fee. It is “the amazing stories of ordinary instances,” in keeping with the
Before taking off for Cleveland for Season 3, Koenig examines Amy Bach’s e-book, “Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court,” which the latter used as a springboard to release Measures for Justice (MFJ). Under Bach’s course, the nonprofit advanced a hard and fast of overall performance measures from arrest to publish-conviction and compared the results across u. S. A..’s greater than 3,000 counties. MFJ’s data, online and available to everybody without cost, may be broken down by race and ethnicity, sex, indigent status, and age.
On April 29, Koenig will host a discussion using an invitation-only, with Bach, the 2018 recipient of the Charles Bronfman Prize. The annual award of $100,000 goes to a humanitarian below 50 whose progressive paintings, knowledgeable employing Jewish values, have considerably stepped forward the sector.
After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1990, Koenig labored for ABC News and the New York Times in Russia. In 2004, she became a producer on Chicago Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and in 2006, she won a Peabody Award for an episode approximately Guantanamo detainees known as “Habeas Schmabeas.”
Koenig credits her love of phrases and storytelling in part to her father, Julian Koenig, the legendary Jewish marketing copywriter who created rankings of tag tlinesas “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking” for Timex and “Think Small” for Volkswagen.
As for the Yiddish that sprinkles a number of her narration — as an instance, a prosecutor offers “the whole megillah” to a grand jury — Koenig credits that to growing up Jewish in New York City.
