The New York Times

Acast Announces Ad Sales Agreement With The New York Times

~ jen

Following a successful start to its ad sales deal monetizing The Daily from The New York Times in the U.K., Acast – the world’s largest independent podcasting company – will be monetizing even more of The New York Times Company’s iconic podcasts within the U.K. – including the ever-popular This American Life, and the groundbreaking Serial.

While the ad sales agreement only began last month, The New York Times is further tapping into Acast’s experience in the marketplace and opening up more of its podcast inventory within the UK.

Hosted by Ira Glass, This American Life is a long-running weekly public radio show that takes one key theme impacting society today – including politics, science, culture and much more – and tells it through the words of people who were there. In 2020, The New York Times struck a strategic alliance with This American Life, including ad sales representation.

Serial is an investigative journalism podcast hosted by Sarah Koning. U.K. advertisers will now be able to access all three seasons of Serial, plus additional shows from Serial Productions including Nice White Parents and The Trojan Horse Affair.

Joe Copeman, SVP of Global Sales, Acast: “Advertisers in the U.K. can now buy space across an unbeatable package of The New York Times’s podcasts, including some the giants of the game in Ira Glass and Sarah Koenig – whose voices people immediately associate with voices people immediately associate with hit shows. By adding these to The Daily, buyers can now access more than 500,000 weekly listeners in the U.K.

The New York Times Fourth Annual Student Podcast Contest

~ jen

The New York Times announced its Fourth Annual Student Podcast Contest. The Contest opened on April 8, 2021, and will accept submissions through May 18, 2021.

In our Fourth Annual Podcast Contest, we invite teenagers to submit original podcasts of five minutes or less. Your creation can be about anything that interests you, in any form that you like. Our favorites will be featured on The Learning Network.

Students ages 11 to 19 anywhere in the world attending middle or high school can participate. If you can answer YES to either of these two questions, then you can use the Student Submission form:

Are you a middle or high school student residing in the United States or the United Kingdom who is 13 to 19 years old?

Are you a middle or high school student residing in any country outside the United States or the United Kingdom who is 16 to 19 years old?

If you are a middle or high school student who answers “no” to both of those questions, then please ask an adult to submit on your behalf. Adults can use an individual submission form if they are submitting on behalf of one student. An adult who is submitting entries on behalf of more than one student can use the bulk submission form. The adults can be either a teacher or a parent.

Rules include:

Create a podcast that produces a complete listening experience with a clear beginning, middle, and ending.

Beginnings often draw the listener in or provide context. Endings often provide a summary, ask a question or tease the next segment.

You can use any podcast format or genre.

Popular podcast formats include interviews, conversations, nonfiction storytelling and fiction storytelling. Popular genres include comedy, true crime, news documentary, history, radio, theater, and sports. But you can choose from unlimited format and genre.

Podcasts must be five minutes or less.

Please check the length of your audio file. (Just to be very clear, 5:01 is longer than five minutes.)

Your podcast must be original for this contest.

We want students to be inspired by our contests and have an opportunity to reach a wider audience for their work. If you have already published a piece, then come up with something else to submit.

Use appropriate language.

Assume your listeners are New York Times readers. No explicit language, please.

To see the full list of rules, and all the details that go with them, please visit the New York Times website that is about their Fourth Annual Student Podcast Contest. Their post includes resources for teachers and students.

New York Times Added a Disclaimer to Caliphate Podcast

~ jen

The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags indicating that the man it relied upon for its narrative about the allure of terrorism could not be trusted to tell the truth, NPR reported.

The New York Times has added a disclaimer to the portion of its website the Caliphate podcast can be listened to. It includes the following:

In 2018, The Times released a 12-part narrative podcast series called “Caliphate” on the Islamic State terrorist group and its operations. While parts of the series involved a broad examination of the group’s tactics and influence, multiple episodes were driven primarily by the confessional tale of a Canadian man of Pakistani origin who called himself Abu Huzayfah and claimed to have been a member of the Islamic State who had taken part in killings in Syria.

During the course of reporting the series, The Times discovered significant falsehoods and other discrepancies in Huzayfah’s story. The Times took a number of steps, including seeking confirmation of details from intelligence officials in the United States, to find independent evidence of Huzayfah’s story. The decision was made to proceed with the project but to include an episode, Chapter 6, devoted to exploring major discrepancies and highlighting the fact-checking process that sought to verify key elements of its narrative…

…As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of “Caliphate” that presented Mr. Chaudhry’s claims did not meet our standards for accuracy…

…In the absence of firmer evidence, “Caliphate” should have been substantially revised to exclude material related to Mr. Chaudhry. The podcast as a whole should not have been produced with Mr. Chaudhry as a central narrative character.

NPR reported that Canadian authorities accused Shehroze Chaudhry of lying about being an executioner for ISIS. He currently faces criminal charges in a federal court in Ontario of perpetrating a terrorism hoax.

According to NPR, The New York Times offered to return the Peabody Award and the awards’ executive director accepted. The Overseas Press Club also rescinded its Lowell Thomas Award.

The New York Times Acquires Serial Productions

~ jen

Serial logoThe New York Times Company announced that it would acquire Serial Productions, the company that produces the groundbreaking Serial podcast. In addition to the acquisition, The Times also announced that it had entered into an ongoing creative and strategic alliance with This American Life that will enable it to continue to collaborate on long-form audio stories with Serial Productions and to collaborate on marketing and advertising sales with The Times. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Serial Productions is a team of audio’s best and most successful long-form journalists and narrative storytellers led by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig and Neil Drumming. Each episode of Serial’s first season was downloaded 20 million times on average and is credited with igniting the current podcast boom. This American Life is the iconic, long-running, weekly public radio program, founded by host and executive producer Ira Glass.

As a Times company, Serial Productions will commission and edit its own stories and they will now be amplified by The Times. The acquisition will allow the Serial team to tell more stories and produce more series than they had previously.

With The Daily, Serial, and the strategic alliance with This American Life, The Times has now brought together three of the most important audio brands in the world. Along with other chart-topping shows and series, including 1619, Rabbit Hole and Caliphate, as well as the recent acquisition of Audm, The Times will continue to build new listening habits across a range of formats. Creating a strong audio report aligns with the company’s broader goal to help audiences understand the world around them through journalistic storytelling.

Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer of The New York Times Company said, “We’ve seen the power that audio can have in building deeper connections with our audience and we’re committed to bringing listeners the best audio journalism in the world. What better way to show that commitment than by acquiring Serial, the most celebrated and innovative podcast series ever produced and by partnering with This American Life, a program that quite simply transformed the genre. We launched The Daily in 2017 and it has quickly become the most listened to news podcast in the country. Our goal is to continue to evolve our audio offerings and to chart a sustainable course for high-quality, immersive audio journalism.”

Sam Dolnick, an assistant managing editor who oversees Times audio said, “We have been enormous admirers of This American Life and Serial for years and their work has inspired and informed our own. We feel confident the Serial and This American Life teams share our desire to continue to find groundbreaking ways to tell stories, grow listenership and help more and more people better understand the world. They are as mission-driven as we are and we’re so excited to welcome them to The Times family.”

Julie Snyder, the executive editor of Serial Productions said, “We’re incredibly proud of Serial and wanted to find a home where we felt shared values, one where we would be supported and resourced to tell more stories, of the highest quality. We’re thrilled to be joining The Times, where they have demonstrated a commitment to pursuing the possibilities of audio and long-form narrative journalism.”

Ira Glass said, “For years now, when people ask me to recommend a podcast, the first one I mention is The Daily. Effusively. Gushingly. It’s so impressive, how The Times jumped into audio journalism, and made a show that uses the medium so well. I also love how The Daily and the other Times podcasts are narrative journalism, like our show. They tell stories, with characters and feeling, and, of course, because they’re The Times, a lucid analysis of the world around us. I can’t imagine a better partner for the journalism we and Serial do than The Times, and look forward to continuing to invent this still-young world of podcasting with them at our side.”

As Serial Productions joins The Times, the team plans to produce a number of shows and series under The Times and Serial Productions banner. The first, Nice White Parents, will bring listeners along with award-winning reporter Chana Joffe-Walt as she examines the role white families play in shaping public education. You can listen to the trailer now, with the first two episodes available on Thursday, July 30 on NYTimes.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

This American Life remains an independent company and will continue its weekly broadcasts on public radio and its podcast.

The New York Times Acquires Audm

~ jen

The New York Times announced that it has acquired Audm. It is a subscription-based audio app that offers listeners the world’s best longform journalism, read aloud word-for-word by celebrated audiobook narrators.

Launched in 2016, by Ryan Wegner and Christian Brink, Audm transforms longform articles into audio. Adum users can listen to hours of new stories every week, from publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and a host of other publishers.

Some of those other publishers include: WIRED, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Buzzfeed News, ProPublica, Outside Magazine, London Review of Books, Texas Monthly, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and more.

Following the acquisition by The New York Times, Ryan Wagner, Audm’s director of spoken word audio production, and Christian Brink, the director of product for Adum, will join the Times Company. The rest of the team at Audm will also join the Times Company.

The Audm app is available to download on iOS and Android for free. Be aware that after your free trial ends, you will be charged. Payment will be handled through the iTunes account (for those who buy Audm on iOS.) Your subscription will be automatically renewed 24 hours before the end of each subscription period. It is unclear how much a subscription costs.

Adum isn’t a podcast, but it might feel a little bit like one, considering that it is audio-based. The way I see it, Audm provides an audio version of articles from a bunch of different news websites, some of which have a tendency to put their content behind a paywall. That alone might make it worth checking out, especially for people who prefer to listen to content than to read it.

The New York Times Seeks a Head of Audio Product

~ jen

The New York Times is seeking a Head of Audio Product to lead the development of all NYT listening experiences. The position is based in New York, New York.

We are looking for an entrepreneurial leader with a strong sense of what makes products great to outline a strategy for elevating our slate of audio programming – from shows like The Daily and Still Processing to specials like Calphate and more to come – wherever they are listened to, and to help answer the question: what should I listen to right now?

The person will develop a vision for how NYT can drive listening habits that are additive to what it means to build a relationship with The Times. He or she will set high-level goals that align with business objectives, identify products/features that drive those objectives, and be responsible for delivering work from a cross-functional team.

Requirements include:

  • Minimum of 5 years product experience with multimedia, consumer, and/or subscription products
  • Experience in zero-to-one product development entrepreneurial environments, creating something brand new.
  • Experience with a love for working on cross-functional teams with multiple stakeholders, and steering engineering, design, and editorial partners to focus on the most impactful work
  • Ability to balance strategic thinking with the nuts and bolts of getting features out the door
  • A passion for audio and The New York Times’ mission
  • and more

Those who are interested in the Head of Audio Position can apply on The New York Times’ website about this job. There, you can find information about what you’ll do as well as the benefits and perks that come with the position.

The New York Times Hired Amanda McCartney

~ jen

The New York Times announced that Amanda McCartney has joined the New York Times advertising team as Director, Audio & Podcasts. This is a new role at The New York Times Company.

Amanda McCartney joins the New York Times from Slate Media, where she sold its selection of podcasts, including advice show Dear Prudence, Lexicon Valley, explainer show The Gist, and Trumpcast, shows for Slate’s Panoply network, and branded podcasts for three years.

Previously to Slate, Amanda McCartney was a national sales manager at The Washington Post and HuffPost. At The New York Times, she will be working collaboratively with client leads to sell The Time’s podcast inventory, like The Daily and Still Processing, as well as calling on direct response podcast agencies.

The Daily is hosted by Michael Barbaro. A new twenty minute episode about the news topics of the day is posted five days a week. Still Processing is a conversation between Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, two culture writers for the New York Times, as they try to understand the pleasures and pathologies of America in 2018. Other podcasts from the New York Times include: Modern Love, The Book Review, Change Agent, Dear Sugars, Popcast, The New Washington, and Caliphate.

The New York Times Launched the Caliphate Podcast

~ jen

The New York Times has launched a podcast called Caliphate. It is a new audio series that follows Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism for The New York Times. Caliphate focuses on the Islamic State.

Caliphate is not the first podcast released by The New York Times, and it probably won’t be the last. However, there are a unique thing happening in regards to how listeners can access this podcast. Each episode will be available to New York Times subscribers a week early. This is being done to thank subscribers for their support for this kind of reporting.

The team behind The Daily (another podcast from The New York Times) presents Caliphate. Rukmini Callimachi is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and has often appeared on The Daily. In Caliphate, she reports on the Islamic State and the fall of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Rukmini Callimachi, with producer Andy Mills, journeys to the heart of the conflict to grapple with the most pressing questions about ISIS and to comprehend the power and global pull of the militant group. The New York Times makes it very clear that “this series includes language and scenes of graphic violence.”

While the subject matter of Caliphate may not be for everyone, it is worth being aware of. In this podcast, The New York Times is taking the standard way that journalism is reported – on websites and in newspapers – and adapting it to include the medium of podcasting. We have seen this before in podcasts like Serial. It is significant that a long established newspaper is now using podcasting as a medium for in-depth journalism.

The Daily Podcast is Coming to Public Radio

~ jen

The Daily is a podcast from The New York Times. A new twenty-minute episode of the podcast is released every weekday. Soon, The Daily will be available on public radio.

The new radio edition of the popular podcast “The Daily” will be available to public radio listeners across the country beginning April 2. The New York Times and American Public Media announced earlier this year that they will be joining forces in this collaboration, which will extend the audio news report’s following of 4.5 million monthly listeners to the radio audience.

The Daily draws on the unrivaled quality and expertise of The New York Times’s global footprint of more than 1,450 journalists. It is a very successful podcast and was the most-downloaded new show in 2017 on Apple Podcasts. It also won the DuPont-Columbia University Award for audio excellence.

The radio edition of The Daily will be hosted by Michael Barbaro (who is the host of The Daily podcast. Previously, he was host of The Run-Up, a political podcast that chronicled the 2016 election.

The radio version of The Daily will air after 4 p.m. ET and listeners can find their area’s specific air time by visiting their local station online. As of March 27, 2018, there were 16 radio stations across the United States that had committed to bringing The Daily to their audiences.

The New York Times Seeks an Audio Producer

~ jen

The New York Times is seeking an audio producer who will take ownership of a New York Times arts show and lead an audio team. The audio team will operate like a start-up within the larger news organization.

The New York Times audio team is seeking a show producer with a passion for the arts – books, music, film, TV, theater. This producer doesn’t need experience on those beats, but should be the kind of person who gets new books and albums as soon as they’re released and takes any excuse to go to a live show.

The producer will take ownership of a New York Times arts show. This includes: generating the concept and structure, in consultation with the host(s) and team leadership, then piloting, testing and bringing that show to market.

After the show is launched, the producer will be responsible for a range of tasks to create each episode. Those tasks include: pitching, booking, research, scriptwriting, recording in the field and in the studio, cutting tape, mixing audio, and managing the show’s distribution and promotion. The producer will also have the ability to do original reporting.

Other responsibilities include: coach New York Times reporters and editors without audio experience as hosts and guests, help source and/or report stories, upload each episode with correct metadata – on and off the New York Times platform, and promote each episode via social media and other channels.

The audio producer position is “a temporary guild position with the possibility to become staff positions”. They want someone who has a passion for podcasts and at least 3 years experience in audio production (among other skills). For full details, read the New York Times want ad.