Talking Newspaper

Actual, I'd suggest an "audio editor" instead of a DAW. There's still a learning curve, and the concepts are the same, but it will be easier to use. is FREE and very popular. It can probably do everything you need. I've been using for about 20 years. It's $60 after the free trial, and then upgrades are free. Like Audacity, GoldWave is mostly a hobbyist program but it's rock-solid and some people do use it for professional voice-over work.

personally... I'd rather use reaper for that project... the project is simple enough.... reaper will let you just drop each piece of audio on its own track... and then do what is needed... such as move them around in time, shorten them, fade them in and out, etc. it comes with enough of it's own FX to also massage the sound as desired, such as a little reverb, or a little EQ and compression. Once I had all the audio clips in the order I wanted, and trimmed as wanted, I would probably do a Save As of the whole project to a new name and folder such as My Project Version 2 and continue working on that. This is just for safety's sake. If everything is perfect as is, you can render it all out to a Stereo [or mono] wav file and be done. IF that is good, then good. If that still needs adjusting, go back into the project version 2 and make those changes and render it out again until you have what you want. Reaper is deep and complex but that don't mean you can't just do simple things with it.

Reaper is not difficult to learn. In fact, when introducing the 'Hard of Thinking' to doing things with audio, I always recommend Reaper. The 'Hard of Thinking' start to cry and ask for their mummies when confronted with Logic, ProTools, CuBase and they pout and stamp their feet if I offer them Garage Band, as it does so very little. All you need for recording voice is a laptop and a microphone. Plug the mic into the laptop and fire up Reaper. Arm track one and press record and start speaking. You can drag-n-drop any link music onto another track and then render the result as an MP3. Job done!

this is a Reaper guide for radio. Its a nice guide - i think all you need is there explained:

Many thanks to you all for your help. Your comments and advice were all very useful and have successfully produced and distributed our first edition using the new equipment and Reaper. I am working on improving and learning. Thanks again. Marticus