News is listened to in the car

The radio goes on by itself; the article waits for you. It’s best to start here, because it’s the difference you notice at the first traffic light: if you get a call while the news is on, that piece of news is lost, while the article stays right where it was. If a truck covers the name of a country, you can rewind thirty seconds. If you arrive at the office in the middle of a long investigation, that half is still there tonight, or tomorrow morning, at the same point.

The commute, after all, is reading time you never had: twenty minutes each way, hands and eyes occupied and mind free.

On the car screen, it presents itself as you already know: cover, title, play, forward. It looks like a music app, with the difference that your articles are in the queue. There’s nothing to learn, which is less trivial than it sounds while driving.

Then there’s the difference in choice. The radio gives you the news it has decided for that hour, in the order it has chosen. Here you choose, and you can select the long piece: in the car, curiously, the twelve-minute deep dive finds more space than in front of the screen, where you scroll away by the third paragraph.

Two practical tips, learned through mistakes. The queue is prepared before you leave, not at the traffic light: three or four pieces in a row, then just play. And if your route has tunnels, underground garages, or valleys without signal, the audio should be downloaded beforehand: the network drops, but the downloaded file does not.

One clarification before you try it: listening in the car is part of the subscription, and the free trial is there to see if your commute justifies it.

Not everything fits, however. Photo collections, obviously. Live blogs don’t either: they are written to be reread updated, and lined up they make no sense. Result tables become a nursery rhyme, and pieces built on references fall apart, because "as told here" is not a phrase that can be listened to.

Finally, those who drive do not have full attention. An article that needs to be listened to three times to be understood remains a desk article even when read by the best voice, and in the car it’s best to leave it where it is.