Contact NYT Audio Support

by Mgslade

Why does the New York Times insist on a fragmented media experience for their subscribers? Their podcasts can be consumed in my podcast player of choice so why do I need a NYT app to listen? Why are their article audio versions hard to hear?
The Washington Post has, for quite a while, put audio playing links in the web pages right with the story. Why do I need to leave my web experience to go find the associated audio article?
That’s not how I consume the news.
On my social media of choice, I find links to articles. If they’re Washington Post articles I can easily choose to read or listen. If they’re New York Times links I can read with no choice to listen unless I load this app and search for the article.
Please put links on your web pages and ditch this fragmented media app.

by Blaine Tholozan

I am deeply disappointed that the NYT has rolled out this half-baked, clunky design with the expectation that users will spend nearly as much time in it as they did in Audm. It is a tremendous, unnecessary misstep that feels designed by a committee of product managers and execs to juice users. NYT, I like your stories, but I don’t want to be juiced. Especially when you reduce the publication catalogue to half of what it used to be thinking no one would notice?

The strength of the Audm app was that it was lightweight and easy to use. I could easily manage a queue, switch between reading and listening, and refine a search by authors, narrators, publications, etc. These features are either no longer available or obscured in the NYT Audio app’s design. As a user, I am often disoriented as to where I am in the app, and the search/filter features are lacking.

It feels like too much is stuffed in here. The typical Audm user wants to listen to articles read by professional narrators, not random podcasts or stories recorded on laptop microphones. (The latter especially feels like a naked cost-cutting measure.) I am regularly stepping over the content I don’t care about to get to stories.

I would encourage the product team responsible for this monster to really do some reflection. Actually talk to users, then use those conversations to inform the experience. This is not a sustainable offering.

by Xi-Man

Whenever iOS updates this app freezes and crashes. To resolve this the user must uninstall and then reinstall the app. However this reveals the terrible and asinine flaw of the app. The users entire listening history is deleted/erased when you uninstall and reinstall the app. You will no longer have the listening history of whichever and however many episodes/stories you have previously listened to. This will result in a frustrating and time wasting endeavor of marking as played any and all previously listened to episodes/stories. Additionally the app is needlessly slow in its UI response reflecting a design flaw in the underlying structure. This makes the app slow and poorly responsive.

These are truly disconcerting and disruptive issues that significantly degrade the app experience.