To integrate audio services into its news offering and achieve this success, Observador completely rethought its newsroom workflows. Journalists produced text articles and on-demand voice packages simultaneously, and could live-stream interviews too. Observador Director General Rudolf Gruner sees audio as a huge opportunity. “I cannot imagine a successful news brand in five to 10 years’ time that is not able to produce, in quantity, quality audio content,” he says.

Although the Portuguese audio market is not as mature as that of some other countries, the success of the service has proved this was due to a lack of compelling offering rather than a problem with demand. The Observador team now hope this experience will energise other publishers to follow suit.