EXCLUSIVE: The New York Times Is Shutting Down Its Audio App

The New York Times is sunsetting its Audio app, the standalone product it originally launched in May 2023 in a bid to deepen its relationship with audiences. 

The app, which offered a curated audio experience and included content from outside publishers, will shut down in early October, according to Sam Dolnick, deputy managing editor at The New York Times.

The decision came as a result of the increasingly prominent role that audio—and, in some cases, its attendant video—now plays within the flagship News app, Dolnick told ADWEEK. 

When the publisher launched the Audio app more than two years ago, the News app still predominantly featured text articles and photography. But as consumer behaviors changed, with more audiences gravitating toward video and audio content alongside traditional text, the News app began weaving the mediums more natively into its interface.

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In March, the publisher introduced a Listen tab to the home screen of the News app, alongside Home, Play, and You. The update reflects the company’s belief that podcasts and audio journalism have now become central to its overall offering.

“I see this as audio graduating from Off-Broadway to Broadway,” Dolnick said. “But now audio journalism has become so central to what the Times does that it belongs on the main stage.”

Meeting audiences where they are

When the Audio app launched, it made The New York Times one of only a handful of news organizations—alongside NPR and two Dutch publishers, De Correspondent and NRC—that sought to steer listeners toward an owned-and-operated property for audio programming, rather than just to platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, which also host many of The Times’ audio offerings.

Its sunsetting reflects not just how rapidly the digital media environment has shifted in recent years, but also the perpetual tug of war publishers are engaged in when it comes to attracting audiences to their properties compared to meeting them where they already are.

“Most people consume podcasts through YouTube and Spotify, so they were facing the classic on-platform, off-platform challenge,” a former Times employee involved with the app’s rollout told ADWEEK. “This was their shot at trying to get people habituated to a Times-owned platform.”

“Separate products make sense for audiences that are clearly distinct and where the economics can justify a separate experience,” said Ben Berentson, managing director of Code and Theory. “The concept of there being an ‘audio’ audience is going away, just as the idea of a ‘mobile’ audience has mostly gone away.”

Details of the move

The News app will now host The Times’ full podcast archive, including the video assets that accompany certain podcasts, such as the Ezra Klein Show and Hard Fork.

Third-party publishers that had their content featured in the Audio app, like The New Yorker, will not be included in the News app.

In addition to migrating its podcast library to the News app, The Times is also trying to interweave audio throughout the platform in new, more intuitive ways, Dolnick said.

For example, the publisher is working to improve its personalization capabilities, showcasing new episodes of shows that listeners have indicated an interest in. It also plans to more widely integrate audio versions of text articles, enabling a user to read part of a story then listen to the rest, later, while driving or running.

The overarching goal is to make more of its content available in a variety of formats, allowing users to consume the news in whichever way they prefer, whether that changes over the course of a day or a lifetime, Dolnick said.

A broader app strategy

Following the closure of the Audio product, the Times’ app portfolio now consists of News, Cooking, Games, and The Athletic.

The publisher has no immediate plans to consolidate any of its other apps, Dolnick said, citing the unique user experiences available to users in its Games and Cooking apps. As for the Athletic, the sheer bulk of its output makes it a poor candidate to be woven into the News app, according to Dolnick.

As The Times works to improve its personalization technology—spurred, in part, by a recent activist shareholder squeeze—the problem of relevant Athletic reporting going unseen by its intended audience should also decrease. Brand safety considerations, keeping sports content separated from news, could also play a role in the decision to keep The Athletic siloed.

Whether The Times keeps its constellation of apps as is or not, its willingness to be unsentimental in these kinds of decisions is a strength, according to Berentson. 

“One of the hardest things in any media business is to be able to look at their portfolio of products and make dispassionate decisions,” Berentson said. “Something can serve a valuable intermediate or transitional purpose and still have been a smart decision to create at the time.”