The Texas Tribune finds revenue-ready, responsive text-to-audio solution in Everlit
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The Texas Tribune was launched on election night in 2009. The newsroom met the moment by offering robust coverage of the political event.
Today, this nonprofit and digital-first media organization is supported by more than 13,000 members. It has grown a lot since its launch and still aggressively covers public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
As the Tribune’s readership and member support network grew, the organization saw an opportunity to engage more people by expanding how audiences could access its journalism.
“Something we realized is that Texas is a huge state with large readership and varying accessibility. Some want a different content experience, whether it’s text, audio or visual,” says Ryan Kim, product manager at The Texas Tribune.
One of the ways the Tribune experimented was by converting its text articles into audio. This began in 2024 with a third-party tool called AdAuris, but in 2025 The Texas Tribune switched to Everlit because of how it aligned with the original mission of the experiment while also helping the newsroom more easily tap into new revenue streams.
Three Reasons Everlit works
- Automatic audio workflows: Everlit isn’t just an automatic text-to-audio converter, it also helps create workflows around monetizing the audio and distributing it to other platforms, like social media or podcasting services.
- Full control over ad placement: When it comes to ads, news organizations need control over placement. Everlit allows users to pick between pre-, mid- and post-roll ad spots. The tool also gives users the ability to pick where ads are placed based on taxonomies, categories or tags. (Users can also exclude placement based on the information, too.)
- Easy CMS integration: Integration with Newspack or WordPress is made easy with a plugin. The tool can also integrate easily with many other content management systems thanks to its Universal CMS Support.
Newsroom overview
In 2024, the Tribune debuted an initiative to create a network of local newsrooms within Texas. It started with the creation of The Waco Bridge, followed by the Austin Current.
“Our plan is to grow a network of local newsrooms that will lead to stronger news ecosystems across the state, empowering and building trust with more Texans,” says a statement on the Tribune’s about page.
Newsrooms that are part of The Texas Tribune’s local network operate with the support of the Tribune’s product team, which means the Austin and Waco newsrooms benefit from a robust CMS (Newspack) and other systems in the Tribune’s technology stack.
Experimentation at the organization usually starts in one newsroom and then trickles to the others depending on the level of success.
Problem: Scaling up after the experiment
AdAuris was the first tool The Texas Tribune used to convert articles into audio. After some experimentation, the organization got positive feedback from readers for having an accessible “listen” option on stories. But AdAuris lacked detailed analytics and wasn’t able to update the audio when a story was developing.
There was a clear need for a better tool, and a signal from readers that continuing to invest in a text-to audio solution was worthwhile.
In addition to finding a new text-to-audio tool, the Tribune wanted to “gain additional revenue while building reader trust,” says Kim. “As a nonprofit media organization, this is even more important. Another way this comes into play: It allows for sponsors to advertise different messages in a way externally that helps both of us.”
While it was possible to place sponsor messages in audio articles with AdAuris, the process was not streamlined and required the use of a separate tool.
Integrating with the CMS was also important, so the new solution had to work well with Newspack.
Solution: better metrics, features that support news operations
The Texas Tribune organization started using Everlit in August 2025. The AI audio conversion tool is tailored for news publishing and integrates seamlessly with Newspack via plugin.
Everlit handled developing news with ease, updating the audio version of a story within minutes of the text being republished, and offered better metrics than what the news organization got previously.
Everlit also allows publishers to easily place sponsor ads pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll. These sponsor messages on the audio versions of the story became a new revenue stream for The Texas Tribune and its local newsrooms. Initially launching at The Waco Bridge in August 2025, the Texas Tribune got Everlit in October of the same year. The Austin Current got Everlit in January 2026.
“Having as many ways to monetize really allows us to spotlight our work and provides value to our readers through messages that are relevant to their communities,” says Kim.
Everlit also offered readers a sleeker user experience, and the newsrooms benefited from a completely customizable audio player that could display AI transparency information.
The AI note below each player reads: “Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give us feedback.”
Another standout feature is Everlit’s Pronunciation Library, which can help the AI-made audio capture local pronunciations or other important verbal cues. For example, The Texas Tribune’s website URL is texastribune.org. When the Everlit players first rolled out “.org” was read aloud as “.organization”.
“Since Everlit has an editable pronunciation library, we were able to update it to say ‘.org’, instead,” Kim says. “The library is a really useful feature for us; it provides a lot of value because it assists in helping the spoken text sound more natural and less robotic.”
Impact: new revenue streams
Following the decision to keep investing in text-to-audio, one of the biggest benefits from picking Everlit has been the ability to easily monetize and track the audio versions of articles.
“Everlit has become a super, super important lever for our [revenue] team,” says Kim. “The stats that we get on our Everlit modules is part of the rev team’s regular reports back to foundations and partners. They’re asking, how many clicks or how many listens did this article get with my organization’s sponsor message appended to the top of the audio snippet.”
The tool’s metrics dashboards allow the organization to see device breakdown, clickthrough rates, ad clicks, impressions and more.
“We’re trying to better understand what makes a reader click and listen to one Everlit transcription over the other,” says Kim.
In a 60-day period ending in May, the combined dashboard metrics for The Texas Tribune, The Waco Bridge and Austin Current’s “Listen Funnel” show 84% of listeners who started an audio article completed the track.
The organization’s newsrooms are still hearing from their audiences about the audio articles, too. A feedback link prominently placed in the audio player makes it easy to collect comments.
“As any AI tool, it gets a lot of mixed reviews,” Kim says. “I will say that not all of the reader feedback we receive is like sunshine and rainbows, but it does tell us that there is a need somewhere out there.”
Feedback has shown that those with accessibility issues appreciate the option to listen to articles. And because Everlit supports CarPlay, commuters are enjoying the benefits of audio articles, too.
Verdict: text-to-audio for news
News organizations that want to expand their text-to-audio offering beyond just conversion would be hard pressed to find a tool that aligns more closely with publisher needs than Everlit. The tool also keeps readers and organizations’ data private, and doesn’t train its AI model on user data.
The tool helps newsrooms make the AI-made audio tracks as accurate as possible with its Pronunciation Library and ability to quickly update when news breaks.
Customizing the player to match branding is easy and allows for the placement of AI disclaimers.
And the tool allows publishers to monetize audio with pre-, mid- and post-roll ads. While detailed analytics can help news organizations track success of implementation, they also will be helpful to a news organization’s revenue team to report back to paying sponsors.
Everlit offers a free plan that includes five article conversions, but it does not include monetization features. Paid plans start at $125 per month, and may increase based on an organization’s needs. All paid tiers include unlimited article conversions with no token requirements or metered use. Read our getting started guide to see additional pricing information and setup guidance.
Alternatives to Everlit for text-to-audio conversion
While Everlit does not appear to have many direct competitors, Trinity Audio seems to be the most similar. We’ve also included Amazon Polly and ElevenLab’s Audio Native, which have the ability to convert text-to-audio at scale, but don’t offer many of the features that make Everlit a more comprehensive solution for news publishing.
- Trinity Audio is a text-to-speech conversion tool that also uses AI to convert articles between formats. The tool touts the ability to convert in more languages than Everlit. Pricing for its least expensive plan starts at $6.50 a month for 5 articles, but also uses credits which may be confusing if you end up needing to re-convert a story due to a development. Trinity also charges more for the ability to customize the audio player and other monetization features.
- Amazon Polly is an Amazon Web Services offering that allows organizations to deploy text-to-speech conversions. Cost is based on a pay-as-you-go model, which means the more text you convert, the more expensive it gets. Amazon Polly offers self-sign-up, distribution in easy-to-read file formats (e.g. MP3, OGG), and supports SSML, a W3B standard XML-based makeup language used for speech synthesis. This allows for SSML tags that allow the organization to control emphasis, intonation, and phrasing. It also means development support is likely necessary.
- ElevenLabs‘ text-to-audio tool that’s most like Everlit is called Audio Native. While ElevenLabs offers many other AI audio features, the tool isn’t designed to seamlessly integrate into a news publisher workflow. The company’s standards for creation also may not align with journalistic standards.
Help Desk Product Director Leah Becerra contributed to this report.
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