On Monday, Chicago Public Radio will introduce a This American Life podcast.

Starting Monday, October 16, each show will be available to podcast subscribers on the Monday following its national broadcast. After seven days, the shows wil migrate to the program’s online archives.
The price for downloads of these archived shows is $0.95 cents per show. Each is available at Audible.com and at the iTunes Store.

This American Life will continue offering free streaming of past shows.

Ira Glass, host and creator of This American Life, announces the podcast launch on this weekend’s program, broadcast to an estimated audience of 1.7 million listeners nationwide.

“We’ve wanted to offer free podcasts for a while,” says Glass. “And we’re excited to see how they do. We hope they introduce the show to an audience that maybe isn’t tuning into public radio just yet.”

While the show will be making its most recent episodes available for free, it’s still planning to charge for access to its archives.

“For six years Audible.com has had the privilege of introducing tens of thousands of new listeners in 120 countries to This American Life,” says Brian Fielding, EVP Content for Audible.com. “The ten-year This American Life archive is the paradigm for the power of the internet’s ‘long tail’ and Audible.com is delighted to continue our association with This American Life by offering it on-demand – as individual programs and in multiple program packages, as well as through our advertising sponsorship support of the free podcast.”

Produced by Chicago Public Radio and distributed by Public Radio International, This American Life has been widely praised for pioneering a new way to tell stories on the radio.