No. 97 Audm: Gigs for Actors & Journalism On the Go

For $7 a month, you can listen to long-form journalism read by excellent actors on Audm. Over 50 publications, including The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair contribute their best stories on hacking, racism, arts, and diverse global narratives. Audm employees over 30 actors to read the stories, including Jefferson County, WA native Renata Friedman.

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f you are like me, you gave up your subscription to The New Yorker because the issues were just piling up and you can’t seem to find the time to sit down and read the online version. Now you can clean your house, drive to work, wait in the doctor’s office and catch up on the best news stories of the day.

My subscription to Audm has left me feeling connected to the world and better informed - not a natural feeling to come by these days.

Between performances, William DeMeritt would often pick up work in a recording studio at Blackstone Audio, one of the biggest publishers of audiobooks in the country. Blackstone also happens to be headquartered in Ashland, just three miles down the road from one of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s leading theaters. It was there that DeMeritt recorded the narration for several magazine articles, including “The First White President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Atlantic published the article online along with an embedded link to the audio version of the piece on SoundCloud. The same day, the piece was published on Audm, the mobile audio startup that had commissioned the recording and hired DeMeritt to read it.

-- Amid audio boom, magazines hire actors to voice their work.