That New Yorker subscription you pay for... but only read the cartoons? There's a fix. The New York Times just acquired Audm, a subscription app that turns longform articles into audio. For $8.99/month, Audm gives subscribers audio versions of way-too-long articles, so you can feel enlightened while cleaning out the closet.
Double-down on the "pod boom"... The NYT learned, maybe from its own article on the topic, that podcast growth in the US is popping. In November 2019, a whopping 62M Americans listened to pods each week, up from 19M in 2013. The Times' The Daily pod is already the top daily pod on Spotify, but it wants an even bigger share of America's ears — so it's audio-fying its articles.
This 1 acquisition basically doubles the Times' content... The NYT already has the raw news content — that's the most time/research-intensive part of journalism. But now for each 12-page article it churns out, it can expand reach (and earn more money) by converting it to another medium (audio). Since media is a combo of "Content" + "Distribution," the more distribution channels a quality publisher has, the greater their reach.