For six months or so I’ve been grabbing the audio edition of The Economist. It’s superb in terms of quality and mad in terms of size. Each week they churn out about 6 hours of word-for-word reading of the week’s articles (the christmas edition was over 9 hours). That’s a lot of stuff, and they manage to get this out by the end of Friday every week.
It’s not a substitute for the newspaper for a couple of reasons. First, the download is a ZIP of MP3 files (which is fine), but you have to guess if you want to listen to a story based on a rather short file name. I find I can make better decisions on what I want to read by flipping through the print edition. The second reason you don’t want to rely on the audio is that the print and web editions include graphics, which are often excellent. Check out the free daily charts web site if you don’t believe me.