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The New York Times released its highly anticipated audio app on Wednesday, an ambitious product whose fate could influence the future of audio journalism and whose launch represents the first stand-alone app the publisher has debuted since the Cooking app nine years ago.
The new platform, called New York Times Audio, will be available exclusively to All Access and News subscribers on iOS, an audience of roughly 9.5 million listeners. At the end of last year, The Times averaged 129 million downloads per month across its audio portfolio, according to the publisher.
“The Times is best when it becomes a part of your life and offers the authority of the institution to help guide you to the information you need,” said deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick. “With Audio, we wanted to see how we could offer that guidance—the serendipity, the big story, the surprise and delight—all with your phone in your pocket.”
The introduction of a proprietary app to house its audio journalism represents a bold evolution of The Times’ broader strategy to cultivate direct relationships with its audience, according to Esther Kezia Thorpe, a media analyst and co-host of the Media Voices podcast.
Its launch makes The Times one of only a handful of news organizations—alongside NPR and two Dutch publishers, De Correspondent and NRC—that have sought to alter the consumption patterns of their listenership by prompting them to patronize an individual app.
The Times is aware of the difficulty in shifting user behavior, according to Stephanie Preiss, the senior vice president of television and audio at The Times. But nearly 18 months of beta testing helped convince the publisher that ardent listeners would make the migration.
Whether such behavior translates from the sample group to the broader population remains an open question, according to audio analyst Bryan Barletta, the founder of Sounds Profitable.
“This gets at a core question in audio: Should we treat podcasting like streaming, where each source has its own app, or like a browser, where people prefer a specific portal?” Barletta said. “Spotify just unwalled a bunch of its exclusive Gimlet podcasts in April, which would suggest the latter.”
Exclusive audio products hope to lure in listeners
The app will house all of the audio products currently available from The Times, including popular podcasts like The Daily, The Ezra Klein Show and Modern Love.