Liquid content is the talk of the user-experience town at the moment. This is the possibility of choosing a format depending on how the unique user wants to consume the storytelling, whether that’s by reading, watching, or listening.

Some months ago, our local Swedish media conglomerate, NTM, took one small step in this direction. We launched Top News, a news broadcast easily accessible on both mobile via apps and desktop.

This is an AI-powered audio project that has piloted by one of our newsrooms since early autumn. It’s designed to catch the attention of younger audiences that are not customers (yet), but it also deepens engagement with existing subscribers. The initiative integrates cutting-edge AI technology with the traditional newsroom work.

How it works

The project has created a solution that scans the newsrooms article database every 10 minutes. Then, we use AI to summarise the most popular stories into concise, reader-friendly formats. These summaries, reviewed by editors for accuracy and quality, are then automatically transformed into audio broadcasts using ElevenLabs’ voice technology, featuring “Amanda,” the voice of the service.

The result is an automated process whereby the top five stories of the day are packaged into an audio broadcast, complete with intros and outros, available both on desktop and mobile platforms. The broadcast is updated between 7:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. If some story performs well during the day, it will be included in the broadcast.

Top News is placed outside UNT’s paywall, ensuring accessibility to a broad audience.

Key goals and early insights

The initiative aligns with NTM’s broader goals:

• Attract younger, audio-oriented audiences.
• Enhance the user experience with innovative formats.
• Accelerate AI integration to add tangible user value.

While daily listenership started modestly, Top News seems to be matching the reach of similar experiments across the industry. Metrics reveal 50% of listeners are non-subscribers. And, among the subscribers, 30% have chosen to engage with the service. Notably, 40% of users complete the entire broadcast, with peak listening times at 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.

Lessons from the pilot

The pilot highlighted several lessons:

• The newsroom has a need for control over editing. It’s not possible to have a fully automated process.
• It’s challenging to achieve consistent quality for location names and numerical data.
• It takes a lot of refining of the automated selection process to ensure the user experience is good.

The project has given us a brand-new audio player we can reuse for podcasts and other audio adventures, and it has taught us a lot about how to integrate AI in our workflows to deliver journalism in innovative formats.

But most of all, Top News has been a great step toward creating a better foundation for our audio development. It’s also a great step toward transforming how audiences interact with our news.

If you want to listen to it, please go to unt.se and click on Toppnyheter in the navigation bar.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .