Latest Stories from The Associated Press

I really enjoy the quick overview of major news stories, but the ads make it almost unbearable. The same ad plays on repeat after every story, often at a higher volume. When most episodes are under 2 minutes, you’re reaching for the volume control incessantly and can repeat from memory the plot of whatever movie is being advertised or how to make your writing better and faster. 😒 Also, with constant updates, you can end up hearing slight changes to the same story, but that kind of comes with the territory when you’re trying to keep up with what’s happening in the world.

While informative to listen to, it would be great if there were less ads. Or if the ads must remain at their current amount, at least make the episodes longer. Two ads wouldn’t be so bad if the episodes had a roughly 6 minute run time and covered multiple stories. It’d also help if the ads were at about the same volume as the news report the episode covered rather than nearly twice the volume.

An entire episode is only 50 seconds long with half of that being ads?

I used to love the AP News update podcast. Now that you have switched to single updates that are 30-60 seconds long I have to unsubscribe. First, this is exploding my “latest episodes list”, filling up the queue with a bunch of tiny updates. Secondly, I now need to listen to an ad in each one of those micro updates and it’s just too much - the ratio of ad time to play time is now way too high. I’m sure this is why you went to this “micro update” concept, to increase your ad time and this your revenue, but you went too far. Do yourself a favor and go back to a consolidated update that is 3-5 minutes long that bundles the important updates into a single episode. If you guys can do that I’ll come back, but for now you’ve lost a long time listener.