A lot of hubbub about Serial storytelling
In case you’re not one of the five million people who has downloaded the Serial podcast, let’s get you up to speed. It’s from the producers of This American Life and it’s a murder story told in weekly doses.
Why the buzz?
Serial is engaging, it has teachers saying they’ll teach Serial instead of Shakespeare.
But (Serial) storytelling is not new, it’s just that now our appetite for it is robust.
And on the Internet, there’s bandwidth for rampant speculation.
And characters that were kept anonymous are now outing themselves online.
Even the victim’s brother has taken to Reddit.
But get this: the creators themselves don’t know what will happen with the convicted murderer.
As I have always said, DNA is the only thing that can solve this:
She argues that if Lee’s kit came up positive for the DNA of another man, that would exonerate Syed. Under Maryland law, the court must order the DNA test if it deems that the results could exonerate the convicted person requesting it. – CJR
Aleszu Bajak was the founding editor of Storybench. He is currently the director of data visualization at the Urban Institute. Previously, he was a senior data reporter on USA TODAY's data team, part of the newspaper's national investigative unit. He is a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T., was a founding senior writer at Undark magazine and founding editor of Esquire Classic, a project resuscitating the magazine's archives. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, M.I.T. Technology Review and Nature.
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