So before we jump in today, I want to tell you about something The New York Times has been working on for a while. And I’m going to level with you — that when they started telling me about this project, I was very skeptical of it, which made for a couple of awkward internal conversations, because what I understood them to be working on was a podcast app. And I thought to myself, who needs another podcast app? There are plenty of them on the market already. None of them are great, but they’re fine.

And then they gave me the new app as a beta tester, and I realized that I was wrong about what they were building, at least partly wrong, because what they actually built is something nobody has created yet, which is a portal to the world of audio journalism. There are podcasts, including this one, but also stories, essays, profiles. You can listen to digests of the news, and to full news stories, and to full magazine […]