With 43% of the Australian population now listening to podcasts on a monthly basis, the pressure is on for newsrooms to venture into the audio world. Many publications are now attaching audio files to their articles too, for accessibility and to maintain engagement.
Is it worth it for smaller newsrooms to get on board too? LINA member Riverine Grazier has been experimenting, and the CBAA’s Andrew Morris suggests a few AI programs that could help make the process easier.
Riverine Grazier on creating audio versions of its articles
Krista Schade from the Riverine Grazer has been experimenting with AI audio, providing audio links to every article published to help make news accessible to people with vision or literacy issues. Her advice to other publishers:
“I used ElevenLabs to train my voice, which took maybe an hour to do, and involves a monthly subscription but was an easy process.
We plan to train ElevenLabs on the voice of our other journos as well, and when we share a free-to-read article on our website, it can also include an audio link.
One interesting issue that arose was the use of employees’ voices and who ‘owns’ what.
That prompted us to create a voice user agreement where we (the publisher) agree not to use anyone’s AI voice once their employment ends.”
Riverine Grazier also uses Claude AI to run through each newspaper edition before it’s published, which Krista says is “to ensure everything on the page is grammatically correct, suits our voice and layout style and has no glaring errors.”Looking ahead, Riverine Grazier is planning to use AI (Gemini or Claude) to help with newsletter prompts for its Friday weekly email, as well as create a monthly news wrap-up podcast through using NoteBook LM to create a script using editions of the newspaper.
The button that Riverine Grazier displays under every article.
Andrew Morris from the CBAA on which AI tools to use
Andrew is the manager of online products and services at the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA), where he is currently managing a project which ensures all radio stations can be heard on any device, at any time.
Andrew suggests creating a ‘week in review’ style podcast can be simple using Chord AI. After writing up an article, it allows you to drop it into the program and request a spoken word podcast using Australian colloquial language.
He says it’s important to be clear and upfront that you’re using an AI voice to ensure transparency. Andrew’s AI program recommendations:
- Audacity for free audio editing
- Descript for audio and video editing, and audio transcription
- Otter.ai for audio transcription
- Capsho for generating podshow notes
- Squadcast for high-quality audio recording
LINA in the AI space
- Our membership engagement coordinator Emma is currently working on an AI policy template, so watch this space.
- Try out LINA’s Tech Stack Tracker Template, to make it easier to keep track what you’re using and monitor payments and annual subscription renewals.
- Check out this shop talk on what tech LINA members are using.
