Finally caught up. I was really hoping for more details about Sara and Nancy's 20 minutes with Jay, but I understand the limitations of their discussion.
I saw Ira Glass speak here in Philly on Saturday night, and he used the last 15 minutes or so to talk about Serial. I didn't realize how enormously popular it was. It's already the biggest podcast in the world in terms of subscribers/downloaders/listeners. It took This American Life 6 years to get a million listeners, and it took Serial 3 weeks, and it adds another 100k listeners a day. Ira was talking mostly about storytelling; he was a semiotics major at Brown, studying what made a good story. He said with TAL, he wanted to break from a couple molds of broadcast journalism. First, it's not lede > topic statement > facts > topic statements > facts > topic statements > facts. It's all plot-driven. Next, he wanted to tell stories of regular, not famous people, where again, the plot drove the narrative rather than the facts or the characters. He said that Sara earned the right to do a great podcast with Serial a long time ago with the Dr. Gilmer episode of TAL, which involved over 6 months of investigative journalism where everyone on staff thought it was a dead end and was ready to write the story off, and he thinks Sara is absolutely the right person to be pursuing this podcast. It was an amazing talk, he was hilarious and engaging and it was well worth the $ and time.