Serial, Season Three: From Feeling to Structure

From the start, host and reporter Sarah Koenig presents the 2018 season of Serial as a corrective to the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand approach typical of earlier seasons and much of the work of This American Life, from which Serial spun off. In a thematic departure, Koenig sets out to tell the story of structures, rather than merely structure a story. The first character is a “cluster of concrete towers” in downtown Cleveland, called the Justice Center, a name we’ll quickly come to understand as ironic, if not Orwellian. Host Sarah Koenig describes the structure as “hideous but practical”. Koenig and company have built each episode to function like steps along a path, to provide a spatial sense of the Justice Center and a conceptual sense of the social universe in which its denizens reside. In addition to meticulous structuring, Koenig needs all her charm, all her storytelling prowess, and all the wry humour she can wring from the cases she investigates, because the story of the Cleveland Justice Center is an American horror story. It is a damning indictment of the toxic stew of white supremacy, class divides, a punitive philosophy of corrections, and bureaucratic malfeasance that makes it nearly impossible for justice to be served. In a set of several stories about individual cases that occasionally overlap, spill over into different episodes, and circle back through coincidences and thematic unities only to fracture again, Koenig and her colleague Emmanuel Dzotsi evoke a world of cascading injustices

BBC Experiments in local radio broadcasting 1961-62

In the early 1960s, the BBC was given the opportunity to demonstrate that it had the skills and resources to create localized broadcasting, by organizing a series of experimental stations across the UK. Although the output was not heard publicly, the results were played to the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, who were deliberating about the future direction of radio and television. Using archival research, featuring contemporary BBC documents, this paper argues that these experimental stations helped senior managers at the BBC to harness technological innovation with changing attitudes in society and culture, thus enabling them to formulate a strategy that put the BBC in the leading position to launch local radio a few years later in 1967

Criminal: journalistic rigour, gothic tales and philosophical heft

Like many of the shows in PRX’s Radiotopia catalogue of podcasts, Criminal’s sensibility and sound partake of the US public radio formula made famous by This American Life: journalistic rigour and gothic yarns. The show tells “stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or got caught somewhere in the middle”. But it’s moved beyond mere crime journalism to something that aspires to a bit more philosophical heft. Most of the stories unspool through the elegant co-narration between host Phoebe Judge and each episode’s central protagonist. The effect is almost always seamless, thanks to the expert mixing of Rob Byers, and the painstaking interviewing and editing process necessary to produce a coherent and tonally appropriate narrative. While we get the who-what-where details upfront, the when is not as clear, a key distinction between the daily crime beat of a journalist and the story-first imperative of non-fiction narrative podcasting. This review focuses on the first eight episodes to air after the milestone 50th landed in 2016, listening for signs of how the show is evolving as it matures and moves into its next fifty

Nice White Parents and the Phantom Public School

Serial Productions’ Nice White Parents tells the story of “an utterly ordinary, squat, three-story New York City public school building”, and the many schools it has housed over six decades; each one, it turns out, shaped in ironic and disastrous ways by white parents’ ambivalent desire for diversity. Like some earlier Serial efforts, this is a story on a theme: the failure of the American experiment in public, democratic institutions. Thanks to impressive archival research, candid interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, and a deftly delivered dose of Serial’s trademark reflexivity between the object of study and the reporter’s investment, what could have been a depressing dirge for democracy is instead a lively dialectic exploration of the difficulty and necessity of equitable public institutions