The Washington Post debuts AI-personalized podcasts to hook younger listeners

The podcast was developed under a multi-year agreement between The Washington Post and AI voice-generating software company Eleven Labs, which creates audio versions of articles for publishers like The Post, Time and The Atlantic.

She described the podcast format as a “broadening product” — a way to expand The Post’s journalism beyond its core audience — especially younger, more diverse audiences who may be looking for more engaging ways to get their news.

The Washington Post sees this audio experience as supplemental to its podcast portfolio, not a replacement for its audio journalism, Kattleman noted.

“Your Personal Podcast” shows up at the top section of The Post’s app and in the Listen tab. 

Users can choose to listen to an AI-generated podcast, which selects and stitches together roughly four top stories, based on the user’s reading and listening history and topics they follow in the app. Two AI hosts take turns summarizing the news stories, conversing back and forth with a more casual tone than a straight news briefing, according to Kattleman. Each story is less than two minutes long. The podcast continues to change throughout the day, based on the news cycle.

Or, if they’d like, users can customize the podcast. There’s a button at the bottom of the audio player in the app that takes a user through various prompts, including topics, duration and AI voices. They can choose interests like “tech” or “politics,” a pair of AI-generated “personas” who serve as the podcast’s hosts, and the podcast’s length, which range from four to eight minutes long.

The project marks an experiment in meeting audiences where their habits are shifting, while testing whether AI-driven formats can deepen reach and build loyalty at a time when publishers are looking for new engines of growth. 

Ultimately, news consumers are becoming more drawn to user experiences that can get them information in a fast and engaging way. More people are getting their news through TikTok-style feeds, and at the same time tech companies are launching AI-powered browsers that can curate and summarize news for users. 

Kattleman said they will monitor metrics like return and engagement rate to measure the success of the AI-powered podcast. “It’s early, and it’s an experimental product in a lot of ways,” she said. “It’s kind of inventing a new category in a way. It’s so different from traditional podcasts,” Kattleman said. “We’ll definitely be looking at habit-based metrics rather than volume in the early going.”

Glenn Rubenstein, founder and CEO of podcast advertising agency Adopter Media, said the product is the first “seriously innovative” use of AI in audio podcasting.

“This seems like [The Post is] really creating an interactive environment for their audience to engage with the content,” he said. 

He questioned whether this AI-generated product counts as a podcast in the traditional sense. “It’s customized for an audience of one and it lives on The Washington Post app. It’s an audio experience, but it’s not like it’s on a traditional RSS feed,” he said.

Kattleman sees many ways for the podcast to evolve, such as adding more options that users can choose from and more specific topic selections. For example, rather than just selecting “sports,” being able to get updates on certain teams.

Kattleman and her team are developing a Post AI voice integration that allows users to pause the podcast and ask questions out loud, and the hosts can provide further context, clarify something, or provide more information to answer those prompts. While not available for the podcast’s launch, the feature will be added soon, a Washington Post spokesperson said. The direct interactions with the AI hosts are developed from “Ask the Post AI,” The Post’s generative AI search tool launched last year, Kattleman said.

“The idea of a podcast you can talk back to, or converse with? That’s actually the power here,” Rubenstein said. This could leave room for interactive audio ads, where listeners can engage directly with an ad spot, for example, he added.

Kattleman also sees opportunities to monetize the AI-powered podcast — eventually. “We really want to first think about how we can get to that broader audience swath before we start aggressively monetizing it,” she said.

The Washington Post has shipped several AI-powered products recently, including conversational voice functionality, AI-generated audio articles, AI news summaries and AI-powered commenting.

This project took about six months to complete, Kattleman said. Getting to the demo stage wasn’t difficult, but the trickier part was refining the podcast, she said. The Post’s product team created an internal scoring algorithm to determine the quality of the podcast, looking at factual accuracy, tone of the AI voices, attribution, and how engaging the podcast was.

The Washington Post will promote “Your Personal Podcast” with onboarding screens on its app, app notifications and other outreach to subscribers and readers, Kattleman said.