A Study of Literary Non-fiction

What is a Podcast? + iPod broadcast

What is a Podcast? Enormous distribution

What is a Podcast? Any MP3 player

What’s the deal? Increasingly popular form of entertainment and information distribution. As of 2016, 21% of Americans age 12 or older say they have listened to a podcast in the past month, reflecting steady incremental growth since 2013 – when this share was 12%. Podcasts exist on a variety of subjects including pop culture, world news, politics, even fantasy football. Anyone can create and distribute a podcast.

What’s the deal with podcasts?

Serial – Season One Definition: Serial - a story or play appearing in regular installments on television or radio or in a periodical. Serial , the podcast, explores a suspenseful story over multiple episodes, as long as it takes to tell the story. First released on October 3, 2014, it is a spinoff of National Public Radio’s program, This American Life. Episodes of variable length were available weekly. It ranked number one on iTunes, and remained there for several weeks. Sarah Koenig created and hosted the series which ran until January 2015.

Why Study Serial? Using Serial as our primary text, we will develop: listening skills critical thinking skills critical reading skills speaking skills rhetorical skills We will also apply our prior knowledge of the following: characteristics of fiction, literary non-fiction, and non-fiction irony direct and indirect characterization mood elements of an argument

Why study Serial? The Daily Californian described the podcast as “gripping,” the story as “thrilling,” and applauded the series for giving “listeners a unique opportunity to humanize the players.” Slate’s review pointed out that in Serial “Someone in the show is not telling the truth about something very sinister. That’s the narrative tension that makes Serial not only compelling but also unlike anything I can remember watching or reading before.” The Guardian characterized it as a “new genre of audio storytelling.” Serial by producers of This American Life, is the most popular podcast in the history of the form, averaging over 1.5 million listeners an episode. According to the Wall Street Journal, Serial was “the fastest podcast to reach 5 million downloads and streams in iTunes history” and is “the top podcast in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, and in the top 10 in Germany, South Africa and India.”

Content Season One investigates a 1999 Baltimore murder of 18 yr. old Hae Min Lee and the subsequent conviction of her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed. Koenig has said, Serial is “about basics: love and death and justice and truth. All these big, big things.” She also has noted, “this is not an original idea. Maybe in podcast form it is, and trying to do it as a documentary story is really, really hard. But trying to do it as a serial, this is as old as Dickens.”