Ira Glass has a big announcement for all you This American Life fans out there: His team is creating a new podcast. Serial will be hosted by TAL contributors and senior producers Julie Snyder and Sarah Koenig, and will offer a twist on the theme-based, longform radio journalism format. As Glass explains in the announcement:
[I]t’ll be a weekly podcast, not a radio show at all. The main way it’s different from This American Life is that instead of bringing you a different theme each week, every episode of Serial will bring you back not just to the same theme but to the same story, to bring you the next chapter. We’re starting with a crime story, that’ll run for about a dozen episodes. Our hope is that it’ll play like a great HBO or Netflix series, where you get caught up with the characters and the thing unfolds week after week, but with a true story, and no pictures.
Serial launches later this fall …