Easy like Sunday morning

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

The world has changed for journalists. Many people complain about the death of daily newspapers, and while I mourn their shareholders’ and boards of directors’ consternation at trying to maintain profits at the expense of quality, I see it more as suicide than death by internet. Mostly, I’m sad for the real, committed journalists who got into the business because money wasn’t their priority, but they now serve at the whim of predators who care only about money.

Weird. I hadn’t intended on writing about that at all, but that’s the risk of stream of consciousness composition. I intended to write about cool new tools that are making journalists’ jobs so much easier, and will enable one of the hardest parts of the job, interviews, to be much more efficient.

The hard thing about interviews, besides skittish sources, is getting the information you want in a useful format. If a journalist does an interview in-person or on the phone, he or she has two choices: Ask questions from a script prepared before the interview, or go in with a few questions but prepared for a lengthy interview. (Of course, there are always the fools who go in unprepared.)

The problem with an in-depth interview is the transcription that follows: four hours to an hour of interview. I’m loving the advances my cell phone is bringing to this chore. For one, the app Tape-A-Talk produces great sound quality for in-person interview or Google Voice is great for phoners. I can then take the .wav file and put it into VoiceBase.com, where it will machine transcribe the interview. I can then either edit it on VoiceBase or drop it into Transcribe, http://transcribe.wreally.com, for clean up.

It’s still fairly work intensive, but when the transcription files are in the same place as the sound files, I only have to clean up the words that I want to appear in the newspaper. I love the future.