JOURNALISTS are usually in the business of reporting the news, not making it. But over the past week, “Serial,” a prize-winning, top-rated, true crime podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig, played a starring role in a 5-day hearing that might give a murder convict a fresh chance to prove his innocence. In 2014, Ms Koenig, a journalist, became interested in the case of Adnan Syed, a 35-year-old man serving a life sentence for strangling his ex-girlfriend in 1999. Some details of Mr Syed’s trial in 2000 troubled Ms Koenig, and she spent over a year tracking down witnesses, traipsing around Baltimore, wading through trial transcripts and speaking to Mr Syed himself to try to get to the bottom of what happened to Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old student who disappeared and was found dead a month later in a desolate park on the outskirts of Baltimore. “Serial” was a runaway hit, prompting more than 70 million downloads. Its success was fueled by Ms Koenig’s dogged investigative reporting, which unfolded in real time as her audience awaited new insights and clues every Thursday morning. In its 12 episodes, “Serial” examined the suspicious-sounding man who discovered Ms Lee’s body and questioned the story of the prosecution’s witness who says he helped Mr Syed bury his ex-girlfriend. Ms Koenig tested out the state’s timeline by driving the route Mr Syed was purported to have covered on the day of his crime. She explored whether anti-Muslim bias may have played a role in his trial. She sought out the analysis of the director of The Innocence Project, an organisation that uses DNA evidence to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted. And she got in touch with Asia McClain, a classmate of Mr Syed at Woodlawn High School who said she chatted with him in the school library at precisely the time prosecutors said he was killing Ms Lee.

In November of last year, Martin Welch, a judge in Baltimore, announced he would preside over a hearing to decide whether Mr Syed should be granted a new trial. It is “in the interests of justice for all parties”, he said, that Mr Syed, who maintains his innocence, should have a chance to show that he could prevail in another trial. The hearing opened on February 4th, with two questions on the table. First, was the state’s circumstantial case against Mr Syed based on reliable cell-phone data? The state’s expert witness in 2000 had based his testimony on call logs that may not have been fully trustworthy. A disclaimer about the reliability of the logs “would have affected my testimony”, he wrote, had he seen it. Second, Judge Welch heard new testimony from Asia McClain, the alibi witness Mr Syed’s lawyer had never contacted.

"Serial" skims a uncomfortable line between life-and-death news and entertainment, and the focus on Ms Koenig's personal search for the truth puts her a bit too squarely at the centre of the story. But without Ms Koenig's efforts and the mass distribution of her in-depth reporting on the case, there is little doubt that Mr Syed would be sitting in prison with no hopes of another day in court. The recent hearing is no guarantee he’ll get that new trial—the judge may take days or weeks to decide whether to grant one—and if he does, there’s no telling whether a jury will decide that the new evidence clears him of the crime. But in contrast to countless prisoners in America who received inadequate representation during their trials or were wrongly convicted, Mr Syed has the advantage of at least having a chance to plea his case anew.