Newspapers should make their major stories, editorials and opinion pieces available over the web in audio format. Even a newspaper that allows people to access articles for free (e.g. The NY Times) may find people willing to subscribe to such a service. Someone could then listen to the news while working at her computer or while even while driving. Newspapers already know which articles are most likely to read online. The cost of having someone with a pleasant voice read the most popular articles and making them available online as MP3s would be minimal.
It seems it would be worth experimenting with such a format to see if there is sufficient interest to make a profit from it.
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
I just (last night, December 1st) heard something similar to this on BBC World. It was a company that had come up with this great new voice synthesis program (it could do things like Australian accents, they even had a 'valley girl' accent for a demonstration) and they were talking about selling it's use to newspapers.
Basically, they were hoping to sell the thing so a subscriber would subscribe to this audio service and pay like 35 cents a day (or whatever the equivalent price of the actual newspaper would be) and they'd get this little audio player. Each night they'd plug this thing into a cradle or something and I guess during the night it would download the latest 'edition'. It sounded like they didn't have anything firm yet but were looking into it.
The BBC guys reprting it thought it sounded great but were joking back and forth that they better start looking for work since the they might soon be replaced by the technology.
I was trying to find something talking about it online, but couldn't find anything using Google or looking on the BBCs pages... oh well. Perhaps it'll be reported by others soon.
Well, you could actually tune into your local public radio station and listen to NPR. It has in-depth reporting like a good city newspaper, and is at least as pretentious and biased as the NYT.
I would like to be able to listen to an audio summary of the major stories on the newspaper of my choice.
Better, we should be able to easily customize our selection, which is continuously downloaded to my PDA so that I can listen to it while I am driving or exercising. If my commute usually takes 30 minutes, I will always have 30 minutes of news update to be heard.
Anyone interested in this kind of thing should do a Google search for Read Please and another for Seranade. One will read web pages into your mp3 player. The other will aggregate web audio for your mp3 player.
Who would want to listen to the NY Times. The idea may be ok, but the source sounds repugnant.
A good one, actually i i got some other idea reading this idea! I mean this idea generated another idea in my mind that i am going to implemented in to my new solution to the newspaper induatry.