NYT Audio Reviews

The NY Times recently folded Audm (which it owns) into its own audio app. That was unfortunate because Audm offered far more content and was easier to use. The number of publications dropped from 27 at Audm (of which 6 were NYT content) to 12 at NYT Audio (where 3 are NYT content). Publications that were dropped include The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, New Republic, NY Review of Books, New Yorker and Vanity Fair, among many others. That serious erodes the value of what had been the internet’s best audio magazine app. Presumably those publications would not agree to provide their content under the NY Times banner.

Specific gripes: The list of publications does not indicate which ones are already being followed, without clicking on each. The database of articles appears on two tabs (Today and Discover), whereas they could be combined into one simplified tab. The queue of articles cannot be sorted (e.g., oldest date first). Articles in the queue can be deleted with a simple swipe, except for the one you are listening to. Most maddeningly, it will not stop at the end of an article, but continues onto the next one. NYTAudio developers might rethink what was lost in the transition.

The idea of listening to magazine articles is terrific, and I will use the NYT’s audio app, but now need to search elsewhere to find the publications that no longer participate—which defeats the concept of a single audio magazine app.

I am a regular NYT subscriber, but Audm was my favorite app for listening to articles. It had a diversity of content paired with an easy to use, attractive, clean interface. I agree with the other reviewers who find the NYT Audio app cluttered, difficult to navigate, and pushing stories in which I’m not interested. My pet peeve is how unintuitive it is to build your queue from a diverse range of publications and then how unintuitive it is to then manage that queue as you’re listening. Why is it not possible to delete the article you’re currently listening to? Or to easily skip to the next one? I don’t want to suddenly listen to stories about murder while I’m making breakfast with my young kids! I was able to find how to activate other publications, but it’s so hard to find articles from them, and it was so unintuitive that I understand other reviewers’ frustration. Some of my favorite publications from Audm are no longer available in NYTAudio, which is by far the biggest loss. One of the things I liked the least about NYT articles read, even when in Audm, was the NYT habit of having their reporters read their own articles. Professional voice work is a job for a reason. I would happily go back to paying separately for Audm.

I’m impressed with the polish that went into NYTAudio. It’s a very good podcast app with most of the features you’d expect or want. The exclusive content is nice as well. I see a lot of reviews claiming no ads, or some complaining about there being ads, and as far as I can tell NYT has made no official claim about there being no ads in NYTAudio. I hear less ads on The Daily than when I listen with a third party podcast player, often none, but not always. It’s enough that I prefer to use NYTAudio when I can.

My least favorite thing about NYTAudio is that I now find myself bouncing between it and my normal podcast player. I can’t seamlessly queue up a non-NYT podcast between two NYT episodes unless I go back to my other podcast app.

Has a NYT longtime subscriber with home delivery and full digital access, and a podcast junkie, I have been wondering at what point I would finally be able to listen to all the NYT audio content without any advertising! As you can imagine, our NYT bill is quite expensive ($K’s) so I believe that I have contributed to the NYT audio acquisitions. I am delighted that I will be able to listen to all this content without having to fast forward through a bunch of ads. Shout out to The Daily, This American Life, and Hard Fork. We made back several years worth of NYT subscriptions when we bought Microsoft in January based on Hard Fork reporting.

I’m so happy to have this. It’s not a huge amount of content yet, but what’s here is excellent. Being a NYT subscriber is a wonderful thing!

I spend 2+ hours reading the Times every day, and still never read everything I want to. (I’m a slow reader, and I want to read SO many things every day.) Now I can read the Times while I get work done 😍
My favorite thing is the stories narrated by the authors. It’s so cool to get to hear the voices of the journalists I read so often. The best audiobooks are the ones narrated by authors- they always get the inflection and tone right, because it’s their tone!
Thank you NYT, this is a major life upgrade.

I’ve been a devout subscriber to Audm for years. Being able to listen to a diversity of publishers in the car has been a great pleasure. And seeing the continuous improvement of the user interface really made me love NYTAudio .
With the Audm app being phased out and moved to the NYT app, I got onto the NYT app for the first time. Immediately I was disappointed to see their lack of available articles. Somehow a Vanity Fair article I was midway through listening to on Audm is not available on the NYT app. While I was excited at first to see the other content that was being provided, the reality is it mostly distracts from the articles that I had originally subscribed to hear. All the podcast and curated topics just make the articles hard to find.

For now I’ll be unsubscribing and hoping an app will come that can provide the service I loved on Audm.

I really don’t understand all the negative reviews? NYTAudio has a great interface and is so easy to navigate. Yes, new apps ALWAYS have minor bugs to work out and they’re pretty quick to fix them. They’re still adding additional content from the old Audm app (The New Yorker and Vogue are now available). Features some people claim are missing (such as changing audio speed) are available and easily accessible. Maybe actually use NYTAudio and give it a chance before reviewing? And people complaining about the readers voices are honestly just rude! NYTAudio is honestly better than I expected overall!

Audm is by far NYTAudio I use the most. I love being able to listen to articles from the New Yorker, NYRB, the Atlantic, The Atavistic, London Review of Books, Texas Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement and so many others on my daily walks and when I drive. None of these are listed as publishing partners in the new app.

Instead NYTAudio is pushing all sorts of podcasts I have no interest in. I can get The NY Times podcasts I want on the Apple app, namely The Daily, occasionally Ezra Klein, Matter of Opinion and The Run Up. But Audm is where I do my non-music listening and without being able to hear articles from publications some of which I don’t subscribe to will be a real loss. What was the point of the NYT buying a truly great app in order to destroy it?

As an NYT print subscriber I get the new app free but if all of that Audm content doesn’t transfer I will cancel my subscription and listen to my usual NYT apps as I always have on Apple’s podcast app. Serial and The Athletic are a disincentive to using the new app as far as I am concerned, just so much clutter.

I will also be losing valuable reading time, since I will now have to read all of The New Yorker instead of being able to choose on Mondays which articles to read and which to listen to.

I love NYT in general. I’m a subscriber. I listen to The Daily — well, daily. I’m liking the new Headlines podcast too. But as a subscriber, it pisses me off that I am forced to use NYTAudio to get some of the podcasts. NYT is not the ONLY thing I listen to. I prefer the Overcast app which has just the listening control I want and allows me to set up my own play list where I select the episodes and order I want to listen from a variety of podcast sources according to my own priorities, not a single source with a priority chosen by your editors. I know I could manually jump around inside NYTAudio and between apps, but that’s not what I want to do! I set up my daily list and never have to switch apps all day.

This is my first significant disappointment with NYT.

There are three big problems with NYTAudio.

First, I am not able to log on. As a longtime NYT subscriber, my user ID predates a requirement that it be an email address, but NYTAudio requires that my ID be an email address. If I put my actual ID in, NYTAudio rejects it. If I put in my email address as my ID (which the NYT should be able to correlate with my account), NYTAudio doesn’t recognize my password.

Second, NYTAudio is not iPad compatible. Using an iPnone only app on an iPad is a terrible user experience. How hard is it to provide a user interface suitable for iPads?

Third: Why?? Why does every media outlet create yet another app to clutter up my app catalog when Apple already provides a perfectly good podcat app? There is no good reason I can find to use NYT specific apps. The Safari browser gives a better experience reading the news (with better accessibility features) than the NYT provides with its app, and I am pretty sure NYT hasn’t improved upon Apple’s podcast app woth NYTAudio (although for reasons discussed above I haven’t even been able to log on). This is an app nobody needs that was created for no good reason.

Audm was an exceptional app, well designed with tons of amazing content, NYT Audio is cluttered and mediocre, lacking a lot of the great publications that were available on Audm, pushing their own content. In addition, Audm had transcriptions of all the articles so you could easily switch from reading to listening, or grab a quote from the article, which was one of my favorite features.
As a software engineer, the design and implementation of features in NYTAudio is just shockingly, similar to the NYT app. Feels cheap and clickbaity, not like a media powerhouse. I assume that’s out of the hands of the engineers and pushed by higher ups driven by revenue incentives. I was trying to stay optimistic and give it a real chance but it’s pretty tragic altogether.

NYTAudio is okay but the production quality is terrible! Ever since The Times bought Audm, the readers have been horrible. It is extremely difficult to listen to them, especially the female readers. Over the last year, at multiple social events, we have gotten onto the topic of podcasts and audio. Every single time, it has turned into a group complaint session about the NYTimes readers. Why is The Times putting out this inferior audio? Can’t they see that Audm was a bad buy? Everyone I know that subscribed to the NYTimes cannot stand the readers now. Many listen to the intro to The Daily on the weekend. And then they turn it off, unless it happens to be a reporter reading their own piece. Fix the readers and NYTAudio will be great!

I really wish I I could like NYTAudio more. I am a big fan of the Daily and Ezra Klein, but I am deeply distressed at what is basically the destruction of AudM one of the best apps created.
NYTAudio offers a small fraction of other publications compared to what AudM had offered. I can understand why The New York Times might want to buy AudM but I can’t understand why they had to destroy it. What the New York Times is offering as well as the original AudM could have existed independently of each other. This new app is extremely disappointing - most of its offerings do not compare in the variety or depth that AudM offered. I will continue to listen to The Daiky and Ezra Klein but have little use for the rest of NYTAudio. Hopefully someone else will create a new AudM.

I’ve been waiting almost two years for NYTAudio, ever since Audible canceled the NYT Digest.

NYTAudio is easy to navigate. The audio is much more than a digest of NYT stories, but is specifically recorded for audio, complete with sound clips and additional audio elements where appropriate. I do enjoy the audio storytelling, however I wish they offered a broader selection of stories from the daily NYT.

Maybe that’s coming. I’m just happy to have another option for audio entertainment on my hour-long commute each day.

I was an occasional user of Audm but I am even happier with NYTAudio. I listen to the Headlines daily and just find myself interested in much of what is available and highlighted on NYTAudio - such as Reporter Reads, etc. I’m not a big podcast person. A few things still need to be worked out — the “sharing” feature doesn’t work yet and there are some kinks (such as removing shows from my following list), but I’m hooked. I foresee this being part of my daily routine for years to come!

NYTAudio is great because it doesn’t have ads like other platforms do. I wish there was a bit of curation on the topics so I could easily find The Daily episodes that are focused on art, business, world news, national news, etc. I also wish I could favorite my episodes so that I can go back and remember what episodes I want to share with others. Looking forward to updates on NYTAudio , thanks for making this platform for us subscribers!

I was excited to download this having heard an advertisement on a podcast that I enjoy. I think the biggest disappointment is that it does not pair with Apple Car Play. I do most of my listening in the car during my commute. With NYTAudio I have to use my phone to get to the next segment. The segments are mostly short so I have to do this a lot. Is also like to see the daily “Great Reads” offered in audio which I haven’t found yet. The content offerings are a little sparse so far. I hope they build this out some, and pair it with Apple Car Play.

Rather than have all my podcasts in one, commuter friendly spot, the NYT decided to separate its podcasts into a subpar platform I can only use at home. There’s no Apple CarPlay support so I have to choose between being safe or listening to their podcasts since I’d have to take my eyes off the road to navigate their less than intuitive app while driving. There’s also no Apple Watch support so I can’t listen to their podcasts while I’m exercising. Not really sure what they were thinking by limiting how people can listen to their podcasts.

Meg Greer reviewed NYTAudio with a joyous "No ads!"

And I naturally expected that too. After all, NYTAudio is only for subscribers, right? So doesn't that mean that finally, we can get The Daily without daily ads? Right? RIIIGHT??? But in fact, it means no such thing.

And if I can't get The Daily without ads, even though I'm a NYT subscriber, what's the benefit of setting up a whole different podcast app? The one I already have has a more natural feel. This one requires hunting for the inexplicably hidden fast-forward button. Why bother? I'd rather stick with the podcast app I know and have loved for years. If nothing else, I know well where to find its fast-forward button.

Somebody let me know if NYT ever makes ad-free episodes available to subscribers, as other podcasts have done for years. (Hey, NYT, go ask NPR to show you how it's done.) Until then, I'm not a fan of NYTAudio , which is clunky and difficult and offers me no benefit over the podcast app I already know.

I like the idea of it but it’s frustrating to use. The interface is too graphical, so headlines get cut off and it’s hard to figure out what the article is about. It lacks the ease of organization of the regular paper - no organization by category or section. And it lacks something I think the Post does well, which is to have the articles read aloud by the phone - perfect for when you are out walking or can’t stare at the screen. I appreciate the original content but it’s presented in a cluttered and confused way.

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 NYTAudio , 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.

Since this service was sold as the replacement of Audm, let's compare. No more read-along feature. There are links to websites of non-NYT content, it no longer scrolls to match making the feature effectively non existent. This had been such a revolutionary feature on Audm that I'm stunned they scrapped it, even for their own content. Not that I read along the entire article, but if, for instance, there was a person referenced in the article that you wanted to pause and look up, you could effortlessly see how it was spelled. One of a dozen reasons I loved this feature.
Also there is a dearth of professionally read articles in NYT Audio; a good writer is seldom a good narrator. This really undercuts the value of the articles themselves, but makes NYTAudio very very unappealing.
By far my biggest complaint is the lack of content. It looks like there are many options, but I would estimate it to be less than half of Audm of a few months ago.
Audm had been my absolute favorite app on my phone.
I'll give NYT Audio another month to see if they can get it together before I cancel my subscription.
What a disappointment.

NYT audio has become the 1st stop for me to catch up on reliable news and innovations that I’m interested in.
The sharing button isn’t live yet so I can’t forward segments to people like me who have their hands full but their minds still have space for intelligent perspectives.
I have a question about Ezra’s interviews. Are his guest as brilliant as it seems with their fast, well thought through answers and grammar? God, more enlightened words come into my air buds per minute than I’ve ever experienced unless I speed up my Audiobook, like one must if listening to Barack Obama.
With that in mind, I would love to hear Ezra interview Barack just for comparison to his audiobook.

Obliterated my carefully rationed data.

Despite downloading episodes, if data is turned on, it streams the content at ~2 GB/10 minutes. Additionally, you can’t open NYTAudio or navigate it for more than 60 seconds with having data on or a Wi-Fi connection. Desperately needs an offline mode.

Finally getting around to complaining about it because it glitched after the latest update and ate through all of my remaining data for the month while I listened to “downloaded” episodes yesterday on my drive to work, despite having turned it off in my settings AND NYTAudio yelling at me the whole time that I needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi.

I love the content. However when you take your AirPods out and put them into their case, the audio continues playing on the phone speaker. This bug was fixed many years ago on iPod and iPhone. Maybe just use the iOS player in your app instead of being cheap and reinventing the wheel?

The benefit of moving from a traditional podcasting app to NYT audio was suppose to be the additional content from articles and exclusive podcasts. The new podcasts are small and not as impressive as The Daily, while the articles although very interesting are limited. Perhaps only one new article a week per major news category.

However, the most annoying part of NYTAudio is the inability for anyone using headphones or playing NYTAudio in their car to use their headphones to skip backwards or forewords during content. I tend to skip back occasionally to re-listen to something compelling, but it’s become inconvenient to do so since I have to pull out my phone to do it, which isn’t always safe (especially if I’m driving).

I still like NYTAudio nonetheless and I’m hoping they will continue to improve it. I like how NYTAudio innately concentrates audio content that is newsworthy and compelling (while most podcast content out there is junk).

I was excited when NYTAudio was finally released. For the most part, it's decent, not great! I have 2 issues with NYTAudio . 1 issue is mostly my personal opinion, the other is actually a much larger concern.
First, a lot of the audio are podcast audio that I can get anywhere else for free, without a NY Times subscription. With NYTAudio, not only does it require a subscription, but I still have to listen to the ads that usually go into the free podcast feeds. So why do I have to do this? I'm paying for a subscription but still have to hear ads.
Second issue. There is an accessibility issue with NYTAudio that makes it much less pleasant to control audio playback. I've reached out to the support team, but unfortunately, my feedback was not taken as seriously as I hoped. I was given the usual, have I tried reinstalled NYTAudio , cleared the cache, etc etc, none of these have anything to do with accessibility. Obviously, I did not reach the right person. I'm hoping this review will reach someone who can pass it on to the people who understands. The lack of accessibility support is taking pleasure listening away from me. Please make it accessible.

When I found Audm it was like a dream come true, being able to listen to all the long form articles in my favorite publications by wonderful narrators. The content was vast and actually dated back to 2016 when they started the company. So you could literally catch up on years of articles, just type in a search for what interested you and a huge swath of articles would appear. All you had to do was download and listen.
It was easy to use and contained for example all of the New Yorker articles each week including the book reviews. By contrast The NY Times Audio has cut the content drastically. You get one Ny Times article for the week, many of the other publications are no longer listed and the ones that are have very little available. What you do get is lots of NY Times content pushed on you read by editors not professionals. This seems like a cost cutting measure because narrators reading more content is more $$. Personally I find NYTAudio hard to navigate, with little to offer. I don’t need their podcasts I just want my articles and that wonderful cache of reading that was available on Audm. What will they do with all of that? It’s such a treasure. I used to be a positive NY Times subscriber but if it weren’t for the cooking app I would cancel.

Somehow it’s even more broken after the last update. Unusable.

Nice layout, clean look, and good curation (though not updated as often as I’d like - you’ll see the same few 6 minute shorts from this American life featured for 2+ weeks) but I run into experience breaking bugs daily. Some files will be unplayable for no reason. Sometimes this will happen in the middle of playback. You can create a queue for listening, but every so often, it’ll just get dumped with no easy way to find that stuff. Downloads are shaky. Sometimes they work. Often not. AirPod control integration doesn’t really work. If you like to skip forward with a double tap of your AirPod, sorry, you can’t. If you’re on a run or doing the dishes, you’re going to have to fish around for your phone and unlock it to advance - something that many other audio apps have figured out as a matter of course. I’d like to support this because of the curated content but it doesn’t offer a good alternative to the official podcasts app with this buggy experience.

1. Terrible issues when attempting to play anything using an in-network external speaker. Playback gets totally screwy and it forgets your location in listening. 2. NYT acquired AUDM, and while yes the interface is better than Audm (not hard, that was awful), ultimately NYT Audio has offered a tiny tiny fraction of actual great print articles read aloud, which was my very favorite thing to listen to. I don’t give a crack about This American Life or Cooking show audio, I want all the great journalism that Audm used to offer. 3. NYTAudio looks nice, but imho is not at all set up in a smart way. The “excerpts” from Headlines clogging up the queue of potential content is AWFUL. And the entire system of daily queue vs actual queue is terribly confusing. Ultimately it feels like NYT bought a great app (AUDM) and actually made it worse. Which makes me quite sad.

As a long time Audm subscriber, I am stunned by how NYTAudio has changed and turned into a marketing vehicle for all things NYTs with smatterings, if you can find them, of other offerings. I do not wish to listen to NYTs writers read their own stories. Most often they aren’t good narrators, which why should they be as they are reporters. Moreover, NYTAudio interface is just plain awful. It is difficult to easily access other magazine stories without having to navigate podcasts and a burdensome number of offerings from the NYTs, which I already subscribe to. I have other places I go for podcasts, I don’t want them on NYTAudio. I’m looking elsewhere for the kind of quality writing and professional readers that Audm provided. If I could give NYTAudio zero stars I would. The Audm experience wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing. NYTAudio is broken and appears to be beyond fixing.

The NYTimes owned and then discontinued a much better app called Audm and replaced it with this turkey. Audm had content from a vast array of publications that could not be found together anywhere else. NYTAudio adds very little for someone who is already a NYT subscriber, and I don’t need one more way to listen to This American Life. It’s really annoying that the NYTimes would take great content away from their Audm subscribers just so they can corner the podcast market. It’s a sad story that has happened before in other industries, but I thought the NYTimes cared about making great journalism available to the public. I was wrong.

I really like being able to dip in each day to get a summary of the days news, plus get an in-depth report from the daily. It definitely keeps me coming back frequently.

However, I wish that I could get audio versions of nearly all New York Times stories in the main app, even if read by the operating system’s default voice. I consume more content from the Washington Post because that audio feature is available in their app.

The NYT app is ok as a new app. Too much of a built-by-committee feel, but ok. A tip o’ the hat to the coders who had to harness the multiple agendas of the committee. As a replacement for the brilliant Audm app, though, it’s miserable because the extensive long form content, consistently professional narration, and scrolling text features are gone. (I especially miss the scrolling text, where I could glance at the screen to see a name spelling or to back up and reread a compelling paragraph along with audio. Great for remembering and digesting more complex ideas, easily ignored if wanted to.) I subscribed to and gave gift subscriptions to Audm for the long form journalism it offered. NYT Audio is short on long and long on amateur narration. It is a different thing altogether. Can’t you offer both? I have the NYT audio app on my phone because it is included with my all access subscription. It’s not something I would otherwise purchase, not because it’s bad, but because it is a completely different product than Audm.

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 NYTAudio and search for the article.
Please put links on your web pages and ditch this fragmented media app.

I enjoy the access to content I would otherwise not have or take the time to read so I listen instead. The podcasts I can get elsewhere more easily with a better app. I get emails suggesting things I might want to listen to, but it’s not always easy to find them in NYTAudio .

Today my downloads are all “pending”. Not sure why. Sometimes I go for a walk only to discover I have zero downloads, but when I get home I have a long list of downloads. Where did they go?

The content UI is overly complicated. Even though I’ve been using it a while I still have a hard time finding articles.

I LOVED Audm and I mourn its loss/conversion to NYT Audio every single day. Why is the NYT Audio search interface so bad? Why can’t you filter stories by date or publication? Why is there not an accessible listening history or way to organize up-next stories in a queue with some design principles? Why do they make NYT journalists narrate their own stories when there are professional narrators who are pleasant to listen to that could do a better job? Why are there stories read by AI when I am paying a fee for this service? I appreciate that it’s hard out here in the media landscape but NYT has no business running a once-excellent app into the ground. Boo. I hate to lose audio narrations of some publications but I will probably switch to Apple News or curio soon so there’s at least a better interface.

Whenever iOS updates NYTAudio freezes and crashes. To resolve this the user must uninstall and then reinstall NYTAudio . However this reveals the terrible and asinine flaw of NYTAudio . The users entire listening history is deleted/erased when you uninstall and reinstall NYTAudio . 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 NYTAudio is needlessly slow in its UI response reflecting a design flaw in the underlying structure. This makes NYTAudio slow and poorly responsive.

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

I just got through listening to a 5 min intro from the author of a story about Karen Bass. The piece itself is about 9 min long.

Why are we doing this? If it needs this much time to set up an article…it sounds like the article isn’t doing its job. I find it very odd to listen to someone talk, in natural and conversational language, to jump into a much more stiff version of essentially the same content. Is there a reason for this format? Imagine if every NYT print article was preceded by four paragraphs of the author casually summarizing the piece before dropping the big SAT words in the article.

Do one of the other: either have these writers just converse about the thing they’re interested in like they would in a podcast…or present their writing as audio.