The forensic and compassionate art of true crime podcasts
True-crime podcasts have grown enormously in popularity over the past few years with journalists picking up cold-cases and turning them into immersive stories.
In the ‘Killer Stories: True Crime & Podasts’ panel at Storyology 2018, Matthew Condon spoke with Rachael Brown and Hedley Thomas about what makes a podcast compelling.
Rachael Brown, journalist and creator of ABC Radio’s Trace podcast said that a lot of true crime gets treated like a spectator sport, and she’s “not about that”.
“In the fast churn of daily news I didn’t want to have it as a one TV news story or one radio news story that wouldn’t of done this justice,” Rachael said.
“I listen to a lot of podcasts and I just think it’s the most beautiful medium. It’s intimate and delicate to tease out really important stories and to create that beautiful theatre of mind.
“For the story I wanted to tell, it was the most perfect medium.”
Rachael uses background noise and natural sound to immerse the audience, so they feel like they are with her throughout the investigation.
“Audiences love the evolution and being a part of an evolving podcast, and love feeling like they’re participants and coming along with us — when we discover leads, they do too,” she said.
However, she also said that some listeners often get frustrated with its pace.
“They love being a part of it when it’s happening, but waiting, they don’t like it,” she said.
“I can’t invent an ending and I’m not going to — this is real life and life is messy and life means waiting.”
Rachael was emotional when she explained the very strong relationship she builds with the story’s characters.
“I felt their pain and I still feel their pain,” she said.
“They tell you in journalism not to get too close to your subject, I failed in this regard horribly. But I actually think it strengthens the podcast.
“I’m not a robot, you’re not a robot.”
She also said that it is important to offer the audience a lot of opportunities to enter into the podcast, as many listeners don’t understand what they are or how to access them.
This also allowed greater interactivity and she describes the response as “fast and furious”.
“I definitely think this is the future in terms of compelling investigative journalism and it fosters the community engagement that we need to see breakthroughs in cases like this,” she said.
Hedley Thomas also feels the responsibility to get answers for the families of the victims they have grown close to.
He has an established career as an investigative print journalist, but has shown how to adopt new multimedia methods of storytelling with his successful podcast, The Teacher’s Pet.
“I didn’t know what the medium would entail… I had heard a lot about podcasting but I hadn’t done it,” he said.
The change came about after he was struggling to get motivated with the same kinds of stories he had been doing for many years and said they “seemed a bit one-dimensional”.
“The challenge to do something called podcasting and an investigative series on a story that had gripped me 17 years ago started to take shape.
He went on to say that “it is the most engaging form of journalism I’ve done in over 30 years.”
When it comes to how you select your story and how you tell it, Hedley said you “have to be careful and show your integrity in how you narrate it”.
Hedley also spoke of the craziness of creating a real-time podcast series, but the benefit in having a current and organic model.
“It can be high risk and long hours, but if you can pull it off the listeners really feel like they don’t know what will happen next — because you don’t know what will happen next.”
Keeping the momentum throughout the story has also been important to Hedley.
“If you released all twelve at once people would binge watch them — and then what?” he said.
