When journalist Sarah Koenig released “Serial,” a 12-element podcast approximately a fifteen-12 months-old case concerning a murdered high school female, she no longer most effectively revolutionized podcasting; she created binge-listening.
Downloaded extra than 340 million times, “Serial” have 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 feel of the Byzantine bureaucracy referred to as the USA justice gadget.
“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 yr they spent there, the pair interviewed judges, police social workers, attorneys, defendants, and sufferers. The myriad instances they followed included bar combat, a 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 damaged down through race and ethnicity, sex, indigent status, and age.
On April 29, Koenig will host a discussion using 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 graduation 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 credit her love of phrases and storytelling in component to her father Julian Koenig, the legendary Jewish marketing copywriter who created rankings of trap terms along with “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 developing up Jewish in New York City.
