NYT Audio +12

I use this app every day to listen to the Headlines and the Daily - and often a whole lot more. They’ve set things up in a very clever way where you can autoplay 4 shows with one click. No more endless fumbling through shows to pick something to listen to while you make your first cup of coffee. It’s a very simple and nice routine to start your day each morning.

In addition to the awesome catalogue of NYT produced shows (Ezra Klein, Hard Fork, Matter of Opinion, etc.) there is unique content here as well. Specifically there’s these episodes called “Reporter Reads” where journalists read their own work. These episode aren’t available anywhere else. They’re excellent - and as much as I like professional voice actors - I really enjoy listening to people with their wonderful and unique voices reading their own work.

There’s room to grow of course in terms of offerings, but check it out - and get in the habit of using the daily autoplay feature.

The NY Times recently folded Audm (which it owns) into its own audio app. That was unfortunate because Audm offered far more content and was easier to use. The number of publications dropped from 27 at Audm (of which 6 were NYT content) to 12 at NYT Audio (where 3 are NYT content). Publications that were dropped include The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, New Republic, NY Review of Books, New Yorker and Vanity Fair, among many others. That serious erodes the value of what had been the internet’s best audio magazine app. Presumably those publications would not agree to provide their content under the NY Times banner.

Specific gripes: The list of publications does not indicate which ones are already being followed, without clicking on each. The database of articles appears on two tabs (Today and Discover), whereas they could be combined into one simplified tab. The queue of articles cannot be sorted (e.g., oldest date first). Articles in the queue can be deleted with a simple swipe, except for the one you are listening to. Most maddeningly, it will not stop at the end of an article, but continues onto the next one. The app developers might rethink what was lost in the transition.

The idea of listening to magazine articles is terrific, and I will use the NYT’s audio app, but now need to search elsewhere to find the publications that no longer participate—which defeats the concept of a single audio magazine app.

I am a regular NYT subscriber, but Audm was my favorite app for listening to articles. It had a diversity of content paired with an easy to use, attractive, clean interface. I agree with the other reviewers who find the NYT Audio app cluttered, difficult to navigate, and pushing stories in which I’m not interested. My pet peeve is how unintuitive it is to build your queue from a diverse range of publications and then how unintuitive it is to then manage that queue as you’re listening. Why is it not possible to delete the article you’re currently listening to? Or to easily skip to the next one? I don’t want to suddenly listen to stories about murder while I’m making breakfast with my young kids! I was able to find how to activate other publications, but it’s so hard to find articles from them, and it was so unintuitive that I understand other reviewers’ frustration. Some of my favorite publications from Audm are no longer available in this app, which is by far the biggest loss. One of the things I liked the least about NYT articles read, even when in Audm, was the NYT habit of having their reporters read their own articles. Professional voice work is a job for a reason. I would happily go back to paying separately for Audm.