The audio team at Tortoise Media was profitable within its first 12 months although the “slow news” start-up is still losing money overall, co-founder Katie Vanneck-Smith said.

Former Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones president Vanneck-Smith told the Publisher Podcast Summit in London on Wednesday that although Tortoise began life in 2019 by focusing on articles that could take 25 to 30 minutes to read, they realised “it wasn’t working” because people were only spending about four minutes with them on average.

At this time, the Tortoise membership had an average age of 39 and, when asked what they really wanted, they said “actually, I listen, I don’t read”.