http://serialpodcast.org/about
On January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park. She'd been strangled. Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested for the crime, and within a year, he was convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. The case against him was largely based on the story of one witness, Adnan’s friend Jay, who testified that he helped Adnan bury Hae's body. But Adnan has always maintained he had nothing to do with Hae’s death. Some people believe he’s telling the truth. Many others don’t.

Sarah Koenig, who hosts Serial, first learned about this case more than a year ago. In the months since, she's been sorting through box after box (after box) of legal documents and investigators' notes, listening to trial testimony and police interrogations, and talking to everyone she can find who remembers what happened between Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee fifteen years ago. What she realized is that the trial covered up a far more complicated story, which neither the jury nor the public got to hear. The high school scene, the shifting statements to police, the prejudices, the sketchy alibis, the scant forensic evidence - all of it leads back to the most basic questions: How can you know a person’s character? How can you tell what they’re capable of? In Season One of Serial, she looks for answers.
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainme...17-11o9ex.html
It's not often that a podcast makes international headlines. The latest project from public radio darling This American Life, dubbed Serial, has broken records, soaring up the iTunes charts to the top spot in the United States, Australia, Canada and Britain, as well as becoming the fastest to reach 5 million downloads.

The true crime story has been compared to The Wire, In Cold Blood and Charles Dickens, as well as spawning a recap podcast, dozens of regular recaps and a parody podcast, becoming a cultural phenomenon in its own right.

The legal case has been reopened by US prosecutors as a result of the podcast. But as the show approaches its ninth episode, big ethical questions have not been answered.

Serial is a cold case investigation into the 1999 Balitmore County murder of 18-year old Hae Min Lee, a crime for which her former boyfriend and schoolmate, Adnan Syed, was convicted and jailed.

Narrator and reporter Sarah Koenig spends each episode excavating and weighing up evidence and testimony from the old case as well as talking to the friends and family of Syed, associate "Jay" and Min Lee.

Koenig, who has been working on the story for a year, says she is only "two weeks ahead" of listeners.

She also says her task is not to exonerate Syed, but to discover the truth.

The biggest question raised about Serial is whether we should be hooked on it at all. The person at the centre of the case, Hae Min Lee, has barely rated a mention. Her family have been even more absent and the only details listeners are afforded about Min Lee come from her high school best friend and a personal journal submitted to the court.

The format of the podcast, a creative non-fiction, is designed to make listeners hang out for the next episode, much like an HBO series. A section of the website Reddit devoted to the case has drawn thousands of obsessed amateurs attempting to solve the case before Koenig does.

Such elements would , in themselves, be remarkable, but combined with the extraordinary absence of the victim and her family, some have described it as a silencing. Were there other ways for Hae's life to be remembered in this podcast?

Koenig has implied she has been unable to talk to Lee's family because of the trauma, but seems equally baffled that the case has drawn so much attention.

"I've been intrigued by a lot of stories in my career, but I think a tonne of the interest is because this is a crime. It's a murder case. This sounds naive, but I didn't think that would be a thing. I didn't see it," she told Time.

Another major criticism is the handling of racial issues. The key players in the case are non-white. Min Lee's family is Korean-American, accused Syed's family is Pakistani-American and Muslim, while witness "Jay" is black. Baltimore has a huge black and multicultural population, communities in which Koenig has been accused of being a cultural interloper.

Syed's friend, Rabia Chaudry, who brought the case to Koenig, said the race issues had been underplayed.

"You have an urban jury in Baltimore city, mostly African-American, maybe people who identify with Jay [an African-American friend of Syed's who is the state's star witness] more than Adnan, who is represented by a community in headscarves and men in beards," Chaudry said.

"The visuals of the courtroom itself leave an impression and there's no escaping the racial implications there," she said.

Serial has revolutionised the podcast, even enticing advertisers to take the genre more seriously. As any child pop star will attest, a rapid rise to fame guarantees equally forceful questioning. With four episodes of Serial left, Koenig has plenty of opportunity to answer her critics.
I've just started listening to this, and it's really fascinating.