Credit: Nick Castele / Ideastream
Hosted by ideastream’s Elizabeth Miller and Lawrence Daniel Caswell, Cleveland Talks Serial is a new, locally produced podcast about another podcast. (We trust we need not specify further.)

In its first episode, guests Rachel Dissell of the Plain Dealer and criminal defense attorney Andrea Whitaker discuss issues that emerged in Episodes 1 and 2 of Serial’s third season, focused on the Cuyahoga County criminal justice system.

Our episode recaps of the first three Serial installments can be found here, here and here.

The next episode in ideastream’s podcast will cover the third and fourth episodes of Serial and will likely progress on that schedule going forward. It can be listed to at Ideastream’s website, or downloaded from Stitcher, iTunes or Google Play. In other Serial-related commentary, local attorney Rebecca Maurer has started a blog, Serial Land, which provides further context for the cases and legal issues raised in each episode.

Caswell told Scene, when we asked for details, that producing a podcast about Serial was a “no-brainer.”

“When I hear these big, deep, investigative dives into a city by national reporters, I always wonder how the local reporters feel about that reporting,” he said. “Our podcast is really just a roundtable after show podcast with a panel of local criminal justice experts. But that format allows us to get some local perspectives into the criminal justice system, and into the reporting itself, while having a fun conversation.”

These conversations may be extensions or distillations of conversations that local audiences are having already, which is why Caswell said he suspects the insights from the panelists should be interesting for Northeast Ohio listeners.

But he added that both the podcast and the Facebook group for Cleveland Talks Serial can be enjoyed by the larger worldwide Serial audience.

Lawrence Daniel Caswell is @tinypatron on Twitter. Elizabeth Miller is @llmiller12.

This article appears in Sep 26 – Oct 2, 2018.

Sam Allard is a former senior writer at Scene.

7 replies on “Serial Now Has an After Show Podcast, Courtesy of Ideastream”

  1. “But, but, but… This was OUR story…”

    You got scooped because you were asleep at the wheel or too afraid to rock the boat, WCPN.

    Deal with it.

  2. Re: “scooped” – You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

  3. @Lawrence Daniel Caswell, No. 2

    I can’t recall the last time I used ‘scooped’–to publish a news story before a rival–but hey. Please. Enlighten me. : )

  5. @Lawrence,

    Nice stories.

    What do they have to do with (a) how do I keep using that word; and (b) how I do not know what the word “scooped” means?

    I began practicing journalism without a license in 1972—I go my license/degree in 1984—so I’m pretty sure that, having both scooped and been scooped, I know what a scoop is and I still can’t recall the last time I used the word before the above.

  6. Jeff,

    We’ve been covering criminal justice and justice reform for some time (as the links show). At the same time, the reporting Serial is doing (long term investigative feature-style reporting) is not at all what we do. Also, our podcast isn’t news reporting, at all.

    Hence, being “scooped” does not apply here.

    re: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”: It’s a quote from The Princess Bride.

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