The BBC, Apple News+ and the Washington Post have in the past month rolled out new ways to listen to their written articles, hoping to give busy subscribers a flexible way to explore stories and to attract new subscriptions, executives said.
The Economist Newspaper Ltd. began producing an audio edition of its weekly magazine in 2007 and little has changed since then, said Tom Standage, the company’s deputy editor and head of digital strategy. Professional newscasters record every story in the magazine in a weekly session. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE Unlike podcasts, which are often free and include advertising, publishers tend to keep most of their audio articles ad-free and behind a paywall. They are also cheaper to make than podcasts because the reporting has already been done and they don’t need production add-ons such as music.
The New York Times Co. has also based its read-aloud strategy around longer, narrative stories. It began producing audio stories last fall with Audm, which provides publishers with audio recorded by voice artists. “You can’t have somebody producing a new audio version of one article every time it’s updated,” said Andy Webb, head of product for the voice and artificial intelligence team at the BBC. “But with this synthetic language, there’s hardly any additional cost to production at all.”
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