March 21, 2014

Tribune Co. desires to streamline the scoop reading experience while also tapping into the various success that marketers have seen with audio ads via the launch of a brand new application.

Tribune Co.’s newsbeat app leverages audio to stream about 7,000 newspaper and Web stories from the company’s publications including The l. a. Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. The app also incorporates audio ads between pieces of stories.

“We use professional voice talent for voice overs to hide the stories that we believe often is the preferred among listeners,” said Graham McKenna, spokesman at Tribune Digital Ventures, Palo Alto, CA.

“The use of text-to-speech lets us scale to deliver thousands of extra stories, including breaking news, in real time,” he said.

Tribune Digital Ventures is the Tribune Co.’s digital and innovation branch. 

Streamlined news
The technology uses a mixture of text-to-speak technology and human voice-overs to serve up the inside track to readers.

The idea behind the app is that each reader could have a customised news experience. 

Readers set these preferences by thumbing through different publications, topics and news categories. A few of the specific topics include television shows, sports teams and celebrities.

As each news story is read aloud, readers can backtrack through an editorial or can skip stories.

For the scoop organizations themselves, the app gives the publishers a brand new distribution aggregator, akin to the business model behind Flipboard, Zite and other news aggregators.

However, the variation with Tribune Co.’s product is that its own content just isn’t jumbled in with other publishers’ content, and Tribune Co. is in a position to better control the reading experience.

Additionally, Tribune Co.’s publishers shall be ready to send out news alerts in real-time throughout the app.

The Tribune Co.’s new app

Mobile-first news
The audio focus of the app also taps into some unique advertising opportunities for marketers that giant brands have seen success with on mobile music streaming services similar to Pandora, Spotify and Apple’s iTunes Radio. 

Audio ads would be placed between news segments and is aimed toward generating marketing spend from both local and national advertisers, per the Tribune Co.

The Newsbeat app is offered at no cost download on iOS and Android devices.

The move towards beefing up mobile advertising sales teams speaks to the growing need for publishers to monetize apps and sites as mobile hits a tipping point with greater than 50 percent of traffic.

For example, Time Inc. recently partnered with Google to launch a online ad exchange that’s powered by DoubleClick. The ad exchange is anticipated to hit roughly 116 million users.

Tribune Digital Ventures was mounted ten months ago to assist the publisher create digital services.

“Led by Google and Yahoo veteran, Shashi Seth, the Tribune Digital Ventures group is tasked with tapping the media assets of Tribune Company to develop digital services and products that expand and diversify the company’s reach and revenue streams,” Mr. McKenna said.

“We’ll have a lot more to discuss within the coming months,” he said.

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York