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 Apple Podcasts. 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.
Narrative Design & Execution
The Daily News Brief was designed as a 2–4 minute flash briefing, delivering the day’s top five global stories in a format optimized for smart speakers and on-the-go consumption. The product was distributed daily across multiple platforms, including Amazon Alexa, SoundCloud, WhatsApp, Telegram, and email, ensuring maximum reach and accessibility.
To support daily production, a streamlined editorial workflow was established, with clearly defined roles for story selection, scripting, narration, editing, and quality control. Each story was crafted for clarity and brevity, enabling fast turnaround and effortless adaptation across formats like social cards and messaging threads.
Narration duties rotated weekly to maintain quality and ensure diversity in voice and gender representation. The final product was concise, consistent, and globally relevant—delivered in a multilingual, mobile-first format that made the brief accessible to a wide range of audiences, regardless of platform or device.
Reach
The Daily News Brief attracted thousands of daily listeners across the U.S., Turkey, and the U.K., with the majority of engagement coming from the U.S., where 44% of listeners tuned in regularly. Consistent publishing before 1PM GMT helped ensure global accessibility and positioned the briefing as a dependable source of midday context. Beyond audio platforms, the brief also served as the editorial backbone for TRT World’s daily email newsletter and social media news cards—extending its reach and reinforcing its utility across formats.
Key Outcomes
Unlike many short-form news audio offerings, the Daily News Brief was designed from the ground up as a voice-native product—not a podcast adaptation. Its operational model was built for scale and reliability, using Slack-based automation, CMS workflows, and lightweight tooling to sustain daily production without failure. The result was TRT’s most consistently produced and consumed voice product, validated by ongoing listener engagement and cross-channel reuse. Editorially, the briefing was shaped by a global lens, intentionally curated to avoid over-indexing on U.S.-centric stories and reinforcing TRT’s identity as an internationally focused news organization.
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.