Daily News Brief
Making global headlines voice-first
Overview
The Daily News Brief was TRT World’s flagship voice-first product—a concise, daily audio news summary designed for global reach across platforms like Amazon Alexa, SoundCloud, and email. It served as an accessible alternative to longer-form podcasts, built specifically for smart speaker users and mobile-first listeners.
Challenge
While most digital newsrooms were adapting TV content into podcasts, we saw an opportunity to create something native to voice platforms: a curated, high-quality daily briefing that could be produced at scale and accessed hands-free. The challenge was building a production workflow that balanced speed, editorial integrity, and technical reliability—daily.
What We Built
Flash Briefing Format: A 2–4 minute audio summary of the top 5 global stories, designed for smart speakers and on-the-go listeners.
Multiplatform Distribution: Released daily via Amazon Alexa, SoundCloud, email, and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Editorial Workflow: A streamlined production pipeline with defined roles for story selection, scripting, narration, audio editing, and QA.
Bite-Sized Format: Each story was written for clarity, simplicity, and cross-platform adaptability (social cards, newsletters, messaging).
Multilingual & Gender-Inclusive Narration: Narrators were rotated weekly to ensure quality, voice diversity, and balanced representation.
Reach
Thousands of daily listeners across the U.S., Turkey, and the U.K.
44% of listeners from the U.S., with consistent engagement driven by timely publishing before 1PM GMT.
Served as the foundation for TRT World’s daily email newsletter and social news cards.
Key Outcomes
Voice-first by design: Not a podcast adaptation, but a platform-native audio product.
Operational reliability: Sustained daily output thanks to robust tooling, Slack-based automation, and CMS workflows.
Market validation: Remained TRT’s most consistently produced and consumed voice product.
Global lens: Curated to avoid over-indexing on U.S. stories, reinforcing TRT’s international editorial positioning.
Learnings
Creating a daily voice product at scale requires not only editorial precision, but production agility. By building a voice-native pipeline that integrated tightly with newsroom systems, we delivered a product that met the moment—every day.