When Serial goes parallel

A reflection on the listener experience of podcasting

Series one and two overlapping? Changing the publishing schedule? Committing to something then dropping out? It’s challenging to get the all the decisions right for your podcast.

Serial from This American Life is a podcast phenomenon. The first series broadcast during the autumn of 2014 was downloaded and listened to by millions of people all over the world.

Although podcasts have been rising in popularity again in recent years, I think we can almost single handedly thank Sarah Koenig and Serial for taking podcasts and podcasting to a totally new level of popularity.

For those of you who don’t know, Serial is a podcast that take a single story and spins out a narrative using investigative journalism over the course of the series. It’s kind of a who-dunnit podcast. The first series focused on the murder of Hae Min Lee and the incarceration of Adnan Syed for her murder.

It was gripping. Every episode left you wanting more. Your mind was spinning trying to piece it all together — to work it all out. Did Adnan actually do it?

Series two of Serial started at the end of last year. Same concept, different story. This time it is about Sgt Bowe Bergdalh, an American soldier held for 5 years by the Taliban.

Serial. One story told week by week.

The intro to each episode contains the tagline — Serial. One story old week by week. It’s a defining aspect of the show.

4 Episodes into series two, a short one minute “announcement” episode popped up in my podcast client.

S02 Announcement: New Schedule

Sarah told us that there were altering how often they would be publishing episodes. It would no longer be week by week but week biweekly (Sarah’s pun, not mine). Every other week. This was because they had uncovered new information and were going to squeeze an extra episode into the series.

In order to avoid rushing production and perhaps compromising on quality, they’d decided to break one of the opening promises of the show.

I’ve been podcasting for almost 5 years now. When we started UX Podcast we ignored a fair bit of advice we’d read or been given. One of the things we ignored was to keep to a regular publishing schedule. We were all over the place. Sometimes we had a couple of weeks between episodes, some times over a month.

Subscribers to your podcast don’t know what to expect. Inconsistency isn't a good thing for podcasts. You need to decide your schedule and format and stick to it.

We learn our lesson and started publishing UX Podcast every other week and have done so now without a gap for almost 4 years. Even though we know that some listeners binge-listen, they still know the rate of flow. In 2 weeks, there will be a new show.

Viewing this from a user experience angle, this stinks a little bit of the system (their production capabilities) being forced on the user (the listener). From a UX perspective, we’d shake our heads and tut and say the system should change to meet the needs of the user not the other way round.

The Syed court hearing

Last week, it became even more interesting. A court hearing of Syed had started in Baltimore. Sarah Koenig was in the court room and would be bringing us coverage of the post-conviction relief hearing.

On February 2, Serial released two new episodes. S01 Update: Day 01 and S02 Episode 06. In the series one update, which is 15 minutes (much shorter than a regular Serial episode) we get told that Sarah is going to be bringing us day-by-day coverage of the hearing.

Even though I've been enjoying series 2 of Serial, suddenly I’m thrust back into the world of Adnan and series 1. My pulse goes up. I realise that the Adnan story is much more exciting and my hunger to know what is happening is much stronger than for Bowe Bergdalh — as interesting as that story is.

We get three days of updates. The third 15 minute episode of court room coverage appears in my podcast client on Saturday morning. I'm gripped. I listen to it intently. Then at the end we get told that the hearing is going to continue into next week, but Sarah has to leave Baltimore and get to work with producing episode 7 of series 2.

They don’t know how they are going to cover the rest of the hearing.

What? Wait. I was going to get daily coverage? I've just got my interest levels all up again for Adnan and the series 1 story. You can’t just pull the plug on me!

They have. The updates have stopped. At the time of writing there have been two more days of the court hearing but no further episodes have appeared. The Serial website is quiet. Their world stopped at day 3. I've turned to other media outlets to find out what is going on. It’s not Serial, but I needed to know.

Mixing stories

From a podcasting perspective, we have two issues. The first of which is that suddenly, in the middle of one story (series 2 about Bowe Bergdahl) we switch track, without warning, to another story (series 1 about Adnan Syed).

Mixing stories, or changing the format of your podcast, is another mistake that we made in the earlier years of UX Podcast. One of the things we do is bring (almost) live coverage from conferences we attend. We interview speakers at the event and publish the audio as quick as we can after recording.

We then published these interviews directly to our regular podcast feed. This is the same feed that you will remember from earlier in this article that we had learnt to consistently publish new episodes every two weeks.

The sudden surge of event shows wasn't well received. They had a lot less listeners than our regular shows, even though the content was just as good — it just wasn't what the listener was used to or expecting.

So what we did was create a “side track”. We still publish the interviews directly from conferences, but they appear on Soundcloud and not part of our main podcast feed.

After the event, we repackage them into full-size episodes and publish collections of interviews as regular shows following our regular publishing schedule. The result was much better. Those who wanted instant updates could follow the side-track. Those who wanted to move along at their regular pace were fed episodes as if nothing had happened.

We avoided altering their world. We adjusted ours.

A promise to listeners

The second issue is that Serial made a promise to their listeners, then let them down. There was a commitment in the first of the updates episodes to bring us daily updates. That commitment couldn't, in the end, be fulfilled.

So here we are. February 9. The story so far.

• Serial series 2 moves to being one story told every other week.
• Series 1 is spliced into the middle of series 2.
• The new Series 1 update-series stops abruptly

What would James do?

If I was running one of the world’s most popular podcasts, what would I have done?

I think, given my experiences of running a podcast combined with my individual experience of being a Serial fan, I would have stuck to the week-by-week schedule. They could have bought themselves more time by altering episodes more subtlety, such as splitting a planned episode into two shorter episodes.

When the date of the Adnan hearing was known (which seems to be the end of January) I would have paused series 2. Told the listeners that we’d be taking a break for a few weeks in order to revisit series 1.

I’d have then continued to stick to the weekly publishing schedule. The first extra show would have given background to the hearing and a recap of some of the important points and open questions that we’d hope to hear more about.

The second show would have been fully covering all days of the hearing — a repackaging of the daily updates that I would have probably made available directly on the Serial website. The availability of the daily updates I’d have announced in the first “background” episode.

Simple and hard

Producing a podcast is a bit of a dichotomy. It’s both simple and hard at the same time. It’s really simple to put together some audio and publish it, but the hard bit is getting everything else right. It takes time and mistakes.

Serial is perhaps big enough to push through relatively unscarred, but hopefully they've learnt something about the challenges of podcasting.