New Statesman launches Long Reads podcast following record-breaking audio growth

The New Statesman has launched a new podcast, Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman, featuring the best of its reported features, profiles and essays read aloud by the authors and voice actors.

Five episodes are available to listen now via podcast apps or on newstatesman.com with a new release every Saturday.

Audio Long Reads builds on record-breaking audience growth for the New Statesman’s existing shows – the New Statesman podcast and World Review – which have doubled their listenership since the creation of an in-house audio team in 2021.

It follows the release of a second series of podcasts with the legendary satirist Armando Iannucci. Westminster Reimagined runs in the New Statesman podcast feed and explores how Britain’s broken politics could be improved. The Times gave the first series a four-star review, saying “it works brilliantly. The intimidatingly smart young team… adapt well to Iannucci’s star power and humour”.

Chris Stone, Executive Producer for Podcasts and Video, said: “The podcast market in the UK is maturing rapidly, and the demand for quality journalism in audio is growing all the time. It’s vital for publishers like the New Statesman to introduce new audiences to our exceptional reporting via podcasts. Audio Long Reads does exactly that - and also rewards our loyal subscribers with new ways to engage with our best writing."

Melissa Denes, Features Editor, said: “As an avid consumer of audio, I’m excited to be bringing the New Statesman’s narrative features and reported long form to life in this way. From our brilliant staff writers to guest contributors, we’ll be drawing on new stories and highlights from the archive – one big listen, or read, every weekend.”

The New Statesman's podcasts are nominated for four categories in the forthcoming Publisher Podcast Awards including Best News Podcast and Best Politics Podcast - which the NS podcast also won in 2021, with judges calling it “a must-listen for political animals of all stripes”.

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The first five episodes of Audio Long Reads are available now on all major podcast apps. Episode details below:

I was Joni Mitchell’s ‘Carey’, read by Kate Mossman [listen here]

For 50 years Cary Raditz, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs, was an enigma. In an interview first published on 17 December 2021 (and one of the New Statesman’s most-read articles of 2022), Mossman tells Raditz’s side of the story for the first time - a love affair that began on Crete in the spring of 1970, and which informed Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue.

Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth, written by Jenny Kleeman and read by Emma Haslett [listen here]

The anti-ageing industry is bankrolled by some of the wealthiest people on Earth, including Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Are the scientists it employs close to a cure – and if they are, who wants to live forever anyway?

Operation Warm Welcome: the hotel that became home to 150 Afghan refugees, written and read by Sophie McBain [listen here]

When the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, the Koofi family were among 8,000 Afghans airlifted to the UK, as part of the government’s ‘Operation Warm Welcome’. The New Statesman’s Sophie McBain met them in a hotel in the north of England soon afterwards, where they waited to be resettled. As the months passed she followed their new life, as well as that of the hotel staff and its other residents: an uncertain limbo of bureaucracy and confinement.

By train through Macron’s France, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, written by Jeremy Cliffe and read by Adrian Bradley [listen here]

On the eve of the 2022 presidential election, the New Statesman’s writer-at-large Jeremy Cliffe catches a train from Courseulles-sur-Mer on the north coast to Marseille on the Mediterranean. Stopping along the way, he hears how contemporary France is reshaping itself in the long shadow of De Gaulle: what does the future hold for the Fifth Republic?

How the trial of the Colston Four was won, written by Tom Lamont and read by Chris Stone [listen here from Saturday April 16]

On 7 June 2022, the statue of former slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest. Eighteen months later, four people stood trial for its fall. In this definitive inside account, Tom Lamont explores the human drama of a landmark case, and the knotty questions it raised about racism, justice, protest and history.