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Incorporating Audio Into Your Story

One new way of consuming news comes from a source that may seem inevitable, but for a lot of people, it fits much better into their day than sitting down and reading the paper or scrolling through their phone: podcasting.

Many major news organizations, including the New York Times, NPR, BBC, and The Guardian, all have podcasts. The New York Times’ podcast The Daily, hosted by Michael Barbaro, interviews journalists and guests from all over the nation and the world, with new episodes released as the title suggests, daily.

The success of podcasts like these is in part due to the accessibility – readers have now turned into listeners – which means your audience is now on the go. They can listen to the news, told on a podcast, whenever and wherever they want.

In terms of story and narrative, there is a vast difference between how news stories are told and how they are received.

Telling the Story

As with all modes of communication, there are different affordances to each that are not as accessible in others. When looking specifically at the difference between a traditional news article and news told through a podcast, one affordance that stands out is there is more room to immerse your reader in the story.

One aspect of storytelling that The Daily does really well is incorporate snippets of extra audio into their episodes. If Barbaro and his guest are discussing a politician’s speech, they can take sound bites from that speech and insert them directly into the episode to help provide the reader with context and help them understand what is being discussed in a more focused light.

Receiving the Story

The way a story is received by its audience in an audio format is vastly different than any other. As I previously mentioned, listeners consume a news story or development when they choose, so they can be more invested in it given that they can do it on their time.

The convenience factor for delivering a story that your audience can listen to whenever they want to means that a story truly resonates with that audience more because they can choose when they want to devote the time and energy into educating themselves about a topic, issue, or lens into someone’s world. Listening to a story provides an element of immersion that not even the most detail-laden written work does, which means that as a listener, it takes more effort to comprehend and work through a story.