Weekly Digest
NYT voicing articles with AI, assault on a journalist in London – weekly news digest
by thefixteam
The New York Times will make most of its articles available in audio with automated narration, Axios reports. The company is now testing the feature, with around 10% of users getting access to audio versions of some 75% new articles.
NYT built the technology in partnership with an AI company whose name isn’t disclosed. “For now, the Times sees narrated articles as an opportunity to increase engagement with its news report, but [the company’s audio executive Stephanie] Preiss noted that they could become another destination for advertising at some point”, Axios’ Sara Fischer writes.
The practice of introducing AI-powered audio narrations of text content is increasingly common in news media (editor’s note – we at The Fix also offer the ability to listen to all articles on the website). While this particular feature is new for NYT, it has emerged as one of the new industry’s leaders in audio. The Daily is the most popular news podcast in the world, and its dedicated Audio app reached 1 million downloads last year.
A Russian court extended pre-trial detention of Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was arrested in October 2023 after being accused of violating the “foreign agents” law that the Kremlin uses to stifle free speech in the country.
Kurmasheva has dual Russian-American citizenship. She faces up to five years in prison. In a statement RFE/RL’s CEO said that the charges against Kurmasheva are “a political ploy”, and the journalist was detained “simply because she holds an American passport”.
A presenter for Iran International, a TV channel broadcasting for the Iranian audience from London, was stabbed outside his home last Friday. Pouria Zeraati has survived the attack and already left the hospital.
So far the police have not identified the attacker and have not confirmed the motive behind the attack. Iran International, which is banned in Iran, has faced threats from the Iranian regime in recent years. The channel “returned to its London broadcasting studios only last September, after taking up a temporary sanctuary in Washington DC in February 2023 over a ‘significant escalation in state-backed threats from Iran’”, The Guardian notes.
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