Seven months on from launch, NYT Audio had download figures of a million plus users. It’s an incredible number, especially when you consider this is only available to subscribers. Really proud of everyone who’s worked so hard, and of the richness of the audio experience we’ve partnered to produce and curate. Every day we bring together timely, deeply reported news and analysis, wonderfully clear audio about ideas and Opinion, vivid storytelling in reporter reads and culture, and the fruits of special partnerships from The New Yorker to This American Life and The Athletic, all arted and framed into a unique user experience that can offer real habits. I think we all know we are doing something special. H/t Sam Sethi for noticing

Thrilled to welcome James Shield to New York Times Audio. He’s heading up our headlines audio team based in London and excited to work with him. Our project to (re-)create the NYT as a listening destination, continues. We are now looking for a host for The Headlines, also based in London.

If you’re interested in how AI - as currently designed - will affect journalism and vice versa, The Times’ legal submission makes for essential reading. Pages 30-31 make the case ChatGPT is in fact in direct competition with journalistic work. It shows how the technology uses the journalistic work itself, to create a content experience that in effect competes with that work. I’m fascinated by the fact that LLMs are trained, not only on the facts but the way journalists parse and weigh and express them, to create new ways to experience factual reporting. We editors and journalists should be engaged on this. Recent years have surely taught us that society needs to make sure that journalistic content comes via digital surfaces that are themselves editorial, that people can trust.

One of the pleasures of editing a digital platform is when we get to work hand in glove with other creative disciplines, like digital and Ux designers; learning from how they approach problems and admiring the elegance of where they end up. On NYT Audio we worked with the very best - and here they tell you how they did it. Thank you Grace LaRosa Rimar Villaseñor Damanjot Chatha Lavi Tang @bonchampion.

BBC Panorama, the flagship investigative journalism show, has turned 70. Nostalgia post! These days I am more likely to post about digital innovation or AI, but one of my career privileges was learning my craft there - one of my first jobs in journalism. Over 4ish years, I was apprenticed to the very best: hugely forensic journalists and deeply creative film makers. I used a heavy Z1 to film Paul Krugman’s pleas against inequality on a windy Manhattan roof. I spent months with my hire car securing interviews with underground ideologues and alleged terrorist cells. I traced the funding of efforts to undermine birth control in Africa. On the night of the 7/7 bombs, we pulled together the BBC’s long first broadcast asking why. The “young people” used to joke that the show was called PanicDrama. Many are still cherished friends. Once, on a film about events that brought Putin to power, we had to set up a relay to sprint from the edit suite to the broadcast centre with the final tapes in segments, moments before each went out. The show was over 40 then, now 70, what an incredible institution. Happy Birthday PanicDrama!

She’s right. When it comes to a safeguard against intolerance and global conflict, the exchange of ideas and people, as they study, learn and grow, is still key. Proud to be a Fulbright Commissioner (and a UWC grad too) and work to deepen this mission.

Join us on Tuesday evening at the British Library for this important conversation, which I’m privileged to chair. Disinformation is a known problem now. But are we any more able to deal with it? https://lnkd.in/esFXZRZP

He inspired many of us.