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CLEVELAND -- Sarah Koenig, the host and co-creator of the hugely popular podcast 'Serial,' was still working as a newspaper journalist when the podcast as we know it was born in 2000. Podcasts in downloadable form were conceived that year, but they remained a fairly obscure niche of the Internet until 2014, when came along and changed everything. The show was a spin-off of the public-radio program which gave it a boost by airing the first episode. Over the next 11 weeks and episodes, the audience for 'Serial' grew exponentially, making it the most popular and downloaded podcast of all time - more than 90 million at last count - a number that astonished Koenig and her co-creator and producer, Julie Snyder. The two come to Cleveland on Wednesday, Sept. 9, to talk about their work and the reaction to the podcast at a lecture series sponsored by the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation and Case Western Reserve University. The event is sold out, but the podcast is still available and free for downloading at Koenig and Snyder, who are still wrapping their heads around their unexpected celebrity status, decided to accept the Cleveland date and a few other speaking engagements in part to go back and make sense of a time Snyder described, in a phone interview last week, as 'a little whirlwindy.'

Whirlwindy would be an understatement, as the citation for their prestigious - the first ever for a podcast - noted. 'Serial' rocketed podcasting into the cultural mainstream and inspired countless follow-up pieces and many a heated argument amongst friends about what actually happened on January 13, 1999,' the citation said. Yearbook photos show Hae Min Lee, left, and Adnan Syed, right, the high school students at the center of the 'Serial' podcast. Woodlawn High School yearbook For the benefit of those who have not yet discovered 'Serial,' here are the basics of what happened on Jan. 13, 1999: A high school senior in Baltimore named Hae Min Lee went missing that day after school, and was later found buried in a shallow grave in Leakin Park. Her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, who was 17 at the time, was convicted of her murder, and has been serving a life sentence in a Maryland prison since 2000.

Koenig wrote a bit about the case when she was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. At the time, it was a local, not a national, story. She became interested in it again when supporters of Syed, who believe fervently in his innocence, contacted her at 'This American Life' and asked her to check it out once more. She dug and dug some more, and discovered that the evidence used to convict Syed was pretty thin.

Could he be innocent? Or did the justice system work in this case, and was he indeed guilty?

The story sparked Koenig's curiosity, which in turn sparked Snyder's enthusiasm. They had been toying with the idea of a weekly podcast, one that would follow a single story over many weeks, and pitched it to 'This American Life' host and executive producer Ira Glass.

They broadcast the first episode on 'This American Life' on Oct. The subsequent episodes were released one by one, every Thursday morning, the way chapters from a Dickens novel were once published and grabbed by eager readers. It was new territory for both Koenig, who joined 'This American Life' in 2004, and Snyder, who has been with the show as a producer since 1997, almost from the beginning.

'I'd done a lot of reporting like that over the course of my career, crime reporting or criminal justice,' Koenig said in a separate phone interview from her office in State College, Pennsylvania. 'But I'd never stuck with a story over time. I mean, if you have a beat, you don't have time for that; you're off to the next story. So to focus intensely on one case for that long was a new thing, and so was getting to know and cultivate relationships with sources over that period of time.'

The luxury of time allowed Koenig - who did most of the on-the-ground reporting on the series, with a little help from Snyder and other producers - to do what reporters call a deep dive, amassing documents and going back to sources again and again with new questions. She visited Syed in person, but since recording equipment was not allowed in the prison, she interviewed him for the podcast via frequent phone calls. 'The depth of digging that we did,' she said, 'where we wouldn't just say, 'Oh, this information is unavailable,' we'd say, 'We've got to keep digging and digging' - that was new for us.' The intricate details that the work yielded enabled her and Snyder, who acted as her editor as well as producer, to put together what Snyder called 'an anatomy of an investigation and an anatomy of a trial and conviction, and break it down into its pieces.' Then the question became, as Koenig put it, 'Why would anyone else be interested in a 15-year-old murder case? How To Generate Serial Numbers In Excel Automatically more.

How do we catch people up in it the way we are, how do you keep them with you?' The answer turned out to be Koenig herself, who framed it as the ongoing story of her own investigative reporting, taking listeners along with her as she dug and talking about her own shifting opinions about the case. 'Sarah was very, very honest, putting her inner thoughts out there,' Snyder said. 'It made her really vulnerable.

We're public radio producers, and we're not used to making it personal. 50 Techno Electro Tunes Vol 2 Rar Association. It was uncomfortable for her in a lot of ways, but she's such a reporter, and all she cares about is the story, the story, the story.' That, as it turned out, also became what listeners cared about. 'Serial' spawned countless blog entries and 'podcasts-about-the-podcast,' as listeners discussed and speculated about the guilt or innocence of Syed, as well as the possible guilt and involvement in the murder of other characters in the series.

'I learned that people on the Internet love solving other people's mysteries,' Snyder said. 'It was incredibly gratifying to see that there's a real appetite for real, honest journalism. But I was dismayed at some of the stuff on social media and even the press, where there seemed to be a willingness to say things in the public sphere without thinking through the damage of it.' That part kept Koenig awake at night, worrying about 'the people I exposed whose names were out in the world because of me, that I couldn't protect from what the world had to say.

I mean, you had people online speculating about real people, about who might have murdered someone. It was shocking; it blew my mind. 'We all have secret, ungenerous thoughts, but what I will never understand is, what makes a person put his fingers to the keyboard to write them?' People also put their fingers to the keyboard to write to Koenig and the 'Serial' staff, suggesting - and sometimes pleading for - the subject of their next story.

'Almost all of them were murder cases - a lot of 'my brother was killed,' or 'my son is in prison for something he didn't do,' and mail from a bunch of prisoners where it's, 'I'm in prison and I'm innocent, can you look into my case?' ' Koenig said. 'It's heartbreaking, it's really upsetting, because we're not doing them.'

They're not doing them because they never intended 'Serial' to be just a true-crime podcast. Neither Koenig nor Snyder would even drop a hint about the subject of Season 2, though they did say that it is 'pretty different from Season 1' and will start 'in the fall.' (Be aware: They have defined 'in the fall' as any time before Christmas.) 'We're working on Season 2 and Season 3 at the same time,' Koenig said. 'We had already started on what turned out to be Season 3, and then a time-sensitive story came our way that was too good to pass up, so that became Season 2. We're sort of toggling back and forth, but pretty soon we're going to have to focus only on Season 2.' Koenig ended Season 1 without a firm answer on Syed's guilt or innocence, but believing that the state did not present a case that proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. She said, in her closing, that if she had been on the jury, she would have voted to acquit Adnan.

But, she added, she wouldn't swear to his innocence, either. 'As much as I want to be sure, I'm not.' Meanwhile, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals said in May that a key alibi witness, Asia McClain, should be allowed to testify so her testimony could be considered in deliberations on whether Syed deserves a new trial.

Syed's lawyer may file a request with the Baltimore circuit court to reopen proceedings to 'supplement the record with relevant documents and even testimony' that the appeals court will later review as it makes a determination about whether Syed deserves a new trial. Also, Syed's attorney filed a motion on Aug. 24 that said a newly introduced document showed that the cell-tower evidence on which the prosecution relied for much of its case 'was misleading and should have never been admitted at trial.'

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