That's been up for quite a while, actually, to help low-bandwidth and screen-reader users.

What's new is that they're redirecting to it if you're EU (like myself)

Edit: It's a pity there's no real archive in the text version, as far as I've been able to tell. No way to scroll down to yesterday's news or anything.

They have had that for some time now. It‘s unrelated to the GDPR.

Also, lite.cnn.com

I'm loving that the privacy policy linked on text.npr.org links EU users to a URL on the non-text version which is again just showing a prompt. The actual text-only version of the EU privacy policy is the one linked from that prompt, not the text site.

I'm pretty sure that wouldn't satisfy the requirements for the privacy policy being easily accessible if this were an EU company.