“How Do We Get Every Second of Your Day?”: The New York Times Goes All In on a New Podcast App

The average New York Times reader, as the Times sees it, checks their push notifications first thing in the morning, scrolls through the internet while making coffee, then puts in their headphones to listen to something as they cook, clean, commute, or walk the dog. Stephanie Preiss, a Times executive in charge of the paper’s audio business, has thought about this routine a lot. She keeps a chart of it—the day in the life of a “smart, curious person”—above her desk at home. The paper has long had the news alerts covered, and it’s all over social media and news aggregators, but “what does it look like for the Times to have embedded itself deeply into every single moment?” asked Preiss. “How do we get every second of your day?” The Times is betting on a new app, New York Times Audio, launching Wednesday, after nearly a year and a half in a private beta. 

The app is a home for the Times’ growing audio empire, from new shows across the news and opinion sections, to Serial, which the company acquired in 2020, to its purchase of Audm, the service that turns news articles into audio, to establishing a strategic partnership with This American Life. The Times intends to maintain its audience at the top of the podcast publisher charts as well as its wide distribution and the advertising business that it runs on the backs of all of that. “But we believe that—kind of similar to what we’ve done in text journalism, if you will—we can start to move our most engaged users into our own apps and platforms,” Preiss said.  

Still, it’s a weird time to get into a podcast app business. The age of “There’s an App for That” feels squarely a bygone of the aughts. And this one has debuted to the public at a precarious time for the audio industry. “Podcast Companies, Once Walking on Air, Feel the Strain of Gravity,” read a recent headline in the Times. “The dumb money is gone, the easy money has slowed down, and the smart money has seen some pullback,” podcast guru Eric Nuzum told Vanity Fair. NPR and Spotify both laid off staff and canceled shows. 

“Obviously we’re not immune to macroeconomic trends and headwinds affecting the digital media landscape broadly,” said Preiss, “but we do experience that differently.” She cites the Times’ success at the top of the charts with “a fraction of the number of shows” of competitors, and its dual advertising and subscription business. Even now, the Times is seeing “increased demand for new ad products,” Preiss said, and “historic new audience heights,” with many Times shows, including The Daily, seeing “their highest audience ever, including during the insane peaks of early COVID,” in Q1. The only way to access the app is if you subscribe to the Times in some way (either for news or in a bundle with its other features). For now, the Times is not selling the New York Times Audio app as a standalone subscription, though it is sunsetting the Audm app and folding it into the new program.

Though not everyone is buying into this rosy picture. “I am very suspicious of the claim that the Times is seeing increased demand for new ad products on the audio side, when the evidence is clear that’s not the case,” one veteran podcast producer told me, noting that “many of their ad spots are empty, or only filled with New York Times ads.” Advertising for podcasts is dropping across the industry significantly, they said. Semafor recently pointed out that The Daily has been running without a full slate of paid ads in recent months. Preiss rejected the notion, noting that for years it has been running “consumer messaging” related to the Times’ other offerings.

The NYT Audio app will have exclusives, including a new daily news show called The Headlines, hosted by veteran journalist Annie Correal; it’s a roughly eight-minute sister program to The Daily—though with less “handholding,” as Correal put it—spotlighting about three items, and the reporters behind them, per episode. Unsurprisingly, research has shown that shorts are consistently among the most popular content, pushing the Times to go even smaller than its breakout 20- to 25-minute morning show, which inspired copycats at outlets like Vox and The Washington Post—and which the paper has been interested in building off of for years, kicking around ideas like an afternoon show that hasn’t come to fruition. Headlines, says director of audio Paula Szuchman, “is really the first, I would say, expansion of the Daily universe.” The app will also be home to sub-10-minute stories about what to cook, read, watch, and more; a recent one featured Times Food reporter Priya Krishna sharing her secret to making perfectly cooked rice in the microwave. 

I’ve been playing around on the app the past few days, and it does, at risk of sounding too woo-woo, feel like diving into the Times universe. On Tuesday, I hit play on the playlist curated each weekday morning and was taken from the day’s Headlines, on bank collapses and the war in Ukraine, to The Daily, where Mexico bureau chief Natalie Kitroeff was reporting from the southern border on the day Title 42 ended, to a “reporter reads,” in which publishing reporter Alexandra Alter read a piece she cowrote with Elizabeth Harris about an author who was asked by Scholastic to delete references to racism from her book, to a short by This American Life. “We hope that this will expand the universe of subscribers, but I think that we are very interested in making sure that Times subscribers have a better experience of audio, and one that is an introduction to Times journalism, than they would if they were just to start searching online for news podcasts or culture podcasts,” said Preiss. 

At the very least, the NYT Audio app felt like a smoother experience than Apple’s much-derided podcast app. It felt, too, like a huge investment incongruous with the state of the audio industry—one perhaps only the Times is in the position to make right now.