The “Serial Effect” and the True Crime Podcast Ecosystem

ABSTRACT

Recently, true crime podcasting has exploded. These podcasts organizations mobilize resources, compete with other organizations, gain legitimacy, and focus on sustaining foundings and preventing mortalities. This study uses a mixed methods approach to explore this media phenomenon from the perspective of organizational ecology. A demography of true crime podcasts was conducted and population density over time was calculated. Content analysis of news articles mentioning “true crime podcasts” was conducted to understand how journalists from other media organizations act as legitimacy agents to confer public legitimacy on organizations within the population. Explanation of the true crime podcasts’ ecosystem is provided, as well as evidence of growing public legitimacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Podcast
• true crime
• organizational ecology
• legitimacy
• density
• population demography

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The categorization of particular genres is used as a kind of shorthand to make communication about media artifacts more efficient. Noting that genre depends on intertextuality (Wales 1989), this paper will use “genre” as the generally accepted broad categorization. While the boundaries of genre are permeable and constantly shifting (Chandler 1997), the term as it is used colloquially seems sufficient for this examination.