An Open Source Library For Turning Journalism Into Podcasts

A journalism student in Chicago has built a free tool for converting article text to speech--one of a growing number of new tools trying to improve the reader experience without adding tons of code.

When Texas Senator Wendy Davis gave her 13-hour filibuster against an anti-abortion law last summer, journalists filled the web with a heap of multimedia: videos, tweets, GIFs, and Internet memes that often outshined their written articles. But the Washington Post blog "The Fix" didn't make its readers choose between listening and reading its filibuster coverage. By using SoundCite, a web tool that streams an audio clip behind the text, the Post's account of Davis's speech uniquely captured the event's emotions in digestible snippets without awkwardly breaking up its written text.

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