The success of podcasts, a format that allows audiences to listen to news content at any time and place through smartphones, is inspiring the growing trend of founding digital newspapers based on the audio resource.
We already know about the bold and innovative commitment that the Danish magazine “Zetland” has made by converting all its text content into audio, thus trying to connect with the preferences of young audiences and other users who wish to listen, not read the news themselves.
A giant of the traditional media, The Washington Post, also bets with determination to the audio format (without neglecting, of course, its other audiovisual resources on the digital platform), airing soon a podcast in Spanish twice a week.
Thus, this very popular trend continues as part of the new tools that digital media have used to broaden their audiences and diversify their ways of informing, with surprising results in the increase of audiences.
In the case of the Danish magazine Zetland, the experiment towards the sound format began about three years ago when some textual contents were vocalized by their authors, thus using a more flexible method of narration that makes the listener feel closer to the news, and nowadays this method is much more widespread.
As the interests of the audiences have been studied, almost all kinds of niches of listeners have been created, according to Sara Alford, their director of new audiences and engagement.
“The results have surprised us: the retention and satisfaction of subscribers has improved. Listeners consume more, they stay longer for each story. It also brought a greater feeling of loyalty and commitment from our subscribers. It’s as if this had been a way of shortening the distance between the reader and the media”, she said.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, has motivated its new podcast project, in Spanish, by pointing out that the idea is to narrate to their users the most relevant worldwide news of the day while explaining what’s behind them and why things occur, and for this goal they’ll have the protagonists and experts of the different topics as guests for this project.
This is how the world of transformations goes. The media have to keep up with the new habits of followers and cannot dismiss any resource in order to preserve their closeness and loyalty with the different audiences.
– Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 