Podcasting Legend Sarah Koenig, Host of Serial, Visits Vassar

Fans of the award-winning podcast Serial got a rare treat in late February when the show’s creator, journalist Sarah Koenig, delivered the 2025 Alex Krieger ’95 Memorial Lecture at Vassar’s Martel Theater. In a wide-ranging conversation moderated by Adjunct Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies Paulina Bren, Koenig answered questions about how she approaches storytelling, the importance of shining a light on unfairness and lies, and the best way to get started in a journalism career.

Bren began by asking Koenig why she thought Serial, which has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, has become such a phenomenon—starting with the very first season, released in 2014. That season, the podcast took a deep dive into the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of killing his high school ex-girlfriend but always maintained his innocence. Why are people so riveted by true-crime stories, Bren asked?

“I think that they’re just good stories,” Koenig replied. “They’re inherently dramatic, and the stakes are so high.” If you have to manufacture stakes, Koenig continued, then “you don’t have a story, so you shouldn’t do that story.”

Bren noted that just before Koenig came to Vassar, there had been a hearing on whether Syed’s sentence would be reduced (and, in fact, one week after Koenig’s talk, it was reduced to time served). Bren asked Koenig, who has been following the case for over a decade, what the experience of covering that hearing had been like for her.

“The weirdness for me sitting in the front row is that one of the arguments that gets thrown out a lot by the parties that don’t want him to get released in whatever way is, like, ‘It’s just because he became a celebrity,’ or, ‘the cultural frenzy over this case,’ and I have a lot of feelings about that,” Koenig said. “It kind of makes me mad, because I feel like it’s not the media’s fault that the criminal justice system is sloppy and that there’s too much politicking. … It just felt like it was shoving the responsibility for meting out justice to the press, with me in particular, you know?”

That first season of Serial was the first podcast ever to win journalism’s prestigious Peabody Award and it landed Koenig on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2015. Since then, three more seasons have aired. The common thread running through them, Koenig once noted in an interview with The Guardian, is “the ways in which we judge one another and punish one another in American society. I find that continually interesting and problematic.” Bren asked her to elaborate.

“People have been doing horrible things to one another time immemorial,” Koenig said. “I’m not interested in the crime. I’m interested in what happens after the crime. How do we, as a society, figure out what is fair? We really don’t agree, and I don’t think the system grapples with that.”

Koenig came back to this issue again when a student, during the Q&A, asked what Koenig believed to be the difference between justice and fairness, and what role journalism might have in making sure fairness gets applied on a societal level.

“That is a large and excellent question,” said Koenig. “We know for poor people and people of color in this country, the outcomes are worse at every juncture of the criminal justice system. That’s not fair. But when … everybody’s working according to the law, somehow that outcome is considered justice. And I think that’s where I see the difference—it doesn’t mean just because the system has ‘worked,’ that it’s a fair system. … Journalism’s role is to point that out and to try to get us all to care about that.”

Another student asked if Koenig thought journalists had any power or responsibility to push back on the rewriting of historical narratives.

“Yeah, I think about this all the time,” she said. “I can’t think of anything to do except what we’re already doing, and yet it doesn’t seem to really be working. But I just don’t know any substitute for just telling the truth and memorializing it. … I just think relentlessly pushing back on things that are lies and calling them lies is what we have to do.”

In response to questions from students and Bren, Koenig also shared some tips about breaking into journalism in general and podcasting in particular. She advised students simply to plunge into any internship or work opportunity they could find and “not to be picky or snooty about the outlet. I would just go do it, because that’s how you’re going to learn, and there’s no substitute for just actually doing the work.”

Koenig also said she always “glommed on” to people in the field whom she admired—one of them being Ira Glass, the host of the popular podcast This American Life, where she learned much of her craft. “That served me hugely because I didn’t go to journalism school. I didn’t work for my school paper. So, I didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning, and just being able to kind of be at the knee of people who were really, really, really good at what they did was invaluable always.

“I remember the advice my dad gave me when I went off to college,” Koenig continued. “He was like, ‘Don’t worry about the classes. Figure out who the best professors are; it does not matter what they’re teaching. Just go to that.’ And he was right. So, I feel the same way about the jobs I’ve had: It didn’t even matter what the paper was, or what their beat was, or what their job was. it was just like, if they were good at it, I wanted to be around them.”