How ‘The Daily’ Sounds Out the News

Unlike the rest of The New York Times, “The Daily,” arguably The Times’s most recognizable audio platform, comes with a theme song.

On a special episode of “Song Exploder,” a podcast that deconstructs music, Michael Barbaro described the jingle as a “siren”: “The whole point of the show was to disentangle and to explain this extraordinarily consequential and incredibly difficult-to-understand moment in our history. And that siren to me is both the audio DNA of the show, and kind of a metaphor for the show itself,” he said. (Listen to the episode below.)

With episodes five days a week, the one-year-old podcast uses sound in a way that often differs from traditional news podcasts and broadcasts. “It’s more like an audio documentary,” said Andy Mills, a reporter and one of the show’s founding producers. While traditional audio reports can rely on journalists outlining the facts of the news, “The Daily” asks reporters to describe the scene in which the news occurred, incorporating scene-setting audio and letting sources speak uninterrupted.

Episodes are about 20 minutes long, and though there is no specific formula, there is a guiding principle: “Use a lot of tape,” Mr. Mills said. “And by that we mean the sound of things happening in the world and the sound of people speaking unprompted, unscripted.”

To get that material, the team helps Times journalists to think with their ears. “We started to work with reporters to just vacuum up all of the sounds around them as they’re reporting something, not just the quotable moments from when you’re with the senator, but when you’re getting out of the car, when you’re walking up to the house,” said Annie Brown, another reporter and “Daily” producer.