The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) announced today that it would acquire Serial Productions, the company that produces the groundbreaking “Serial” podcast. In addition to the acquisition, The Times also announced that it had entered into an ongoing creative and strategic alliance with “This American Life” that will enable it to continue to collaborate on long-form audio stories with Serial Productions and to collaborate on marketing and advertising sales with The Times. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Serial Productions is a team of audio’s best and most successful long-form journalists and narrative storytellers led by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig and Neil Drumming. Each episode of “Serial’s” first season was downloaded 20 million times on average and is credited with igniting the current podcast boom. “This American Life” is the iconic, long-running, weekly public radio program, founded by host and executive producer Ira Glass.
As a Times company, Serial Productions will commission and edit its own stories and they will now be amplified by The Times. The acquisition will allow the Serial team to tell more stories and produce more series than they had previously.
With “The Daily,” “Serial,” and the strategic alliance with “This American Life,” The Times has now brought together three of the most important audio brands in the world. Along with other chart-topping shows and series, including “1619,” “Rabbit Hole” and “Caliphate,” as well as the recent acquisition of Audm, The Times will continue to build new listening habits across a range of formats. Creating a strong audio report aligns with the company’s broader goal to help audiences understand the world around them through journalistic storytelling.
Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer of The New York Times Company said, “We’ve seen the power that audio can have in building deeper connections with our audience and we’re committed to bringing listeners the best audio journalism in the world. What better way to show that commitment than by acquiring ‘Serial,’ the most celebrated and innovative podcast series ever produced and by partnering with ‘This American Life,’ a program that quite simply transformed the genre. We launched ‘The Daily’ in 2017 and it has quickly become the most listened to news podcast in the country. Our goal is to continue to evolve our audio offerings and to chart a sustainable course for high-quality, immersive audio journalism.”
more at source: https://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-release-details/2020/The-New-York-Times-Company-Acquires-Serial-Productions-and-Forms-a-Strategic-Alliance-with-This-American-Life/default.aspx