“It’s the holy grail,” says Up and Vanished host Payne Lindsey, who adds that reporter and host Sarah Koenig “pioneered investigative storytelling” for the medium. Let’s face it: This list (and, some may argue, an entire era of podcasting) might not exist without Serial, which set the gold standard not just for true crime, but for the whole genre of first-person, long-form podcast journalism.
But we feel confident that many of the shows on the list below will still be earning mentions when those future historians parse this era’s golden age. And of course, some very strong contenders didn’t land on the list. Because I’ve worked on or reviewed several of the podcasts up for consideration, I relied on a bunch of podcast heavyweights to weigh in. Heck, it may even inspire people to visit an outlet’s website or subscribe to their local newspaper for the first time.Īll that said, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no way to make a list of the most important true-crime podcasts without killing a lot of darlings. And that’s a good thing, because as outlets like Slate and the New York Times and Longreads have learned, a piece of in-depth journalism produced like a true-crime podcast can reach far more people than a standalone story on a homepage.
Some of the best podcast journalism being produced today is borrowing liberally from the production and writing style of true-crime podcasts, building on what works best from the genre, from cliffhanger endings and narrator-as-guide signposting.
#NEW SERIAL PODCAST LISTEN PROFESSIONAL#
Most fit into a handful of categories: standalone long-form series anthologies buddy chat and commentary shows investigations (both professional and amateur) podcasts about criminal justice/wrongful convictions comedy shows and subculture shows that look at crime in sports, for instance, or in the music industry.Īnd while some like to write off true crime as a flash-in-the-pan trend, its influence is everywhere.
And, worst of all, some (okay, many) are copies of copies of copies, recycling the same stories and formats and background music and naming conventions and logos to the point where a glimpse at the true-crime podcast charts can feel like an exercise in parody.īut for those willing to dig a little deeper, the true-crime podcast world is also a rich one, encompassing dozens of subgenres and formats. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of terrible true-crime podcasts out there, because there are. What they’ll probably get wrong, though, are many of the things critics are getting wrong today: that the “true-crime podcast” is a monolithic genre, a single kind of thing with a single kind of fan that it’s a cheap and tacky plague on an industry previously dominated by the real pioneers - the snarky comedians, the nerd-pop-culture commentators, and the public-radio producers and that its popularity is driven by some reductive idea or event, like “our society’s growing social anxiety” or “the release of Serial.” When future historians look back at this golden age of podcasting, they’ll likely point out that true crime was the engine that boosted the medium into the stratosphere.
0 kommentar(er)
