What reporters upload
Reporting produces a lot of tape, and most of it arrives in a few forms:
- Interviews recorded on a phone app or handheld recorder, usually M4A, MP3 or WAV.
- Phone and video call interviews saved as MP4 or M4A.
- Press conferences, briefings and hearings, either your own recording or a public stream.
- Public videos of statements on YouTube or other video sites, which you can import from the link once a live stream has ended.
- Footage shot on a phone (MOV, MP4, 3GP), where timestamps stay aligned with the video.
Finding and checking quotes
The transcript comes back with timestamps next to a synced player. Skim the text for the passage you need, click the line, and listen to the exact words and tone. Speech recognition can drop a "not", merge two sentences or mishear a name, so every direct quote should be confirmed against the audio before it goes into copy.
Pay particular attention to names, titles, numbers, dates and quoted figures, and to passages where several reporters shout questions at once. Keep timestamps in your working notes so an editor or fact-checker can find the original moment quickly.
For a two-person interview, speaker identification labels interviewer and source; it is available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack. For a press conference, rename the main speaker once and the labels follow across the whole file.
Getting it into the story
Press Copy to paste text into your draft, or export TXT for plain text without formatting. DOCX suits a long Q&A you will edit for publication. A read-only share link lets an editor read the transcript without logging in. SRT or VTT gives captions if a clip runs with your story as video.
Interviews in other languages are transcribed in the spoken language. Translations for publication need your own checking; the Google Translate link on the transcript is a starting point, not a final version.
Protecting sources
Think about source safety before uploading anything. For a source whose identity must stay protected, consider whether the recording should leave your device at all. Files are never used to train AI models, and you can delete the audio and the transcript as soon as you have what you need. Avoid putting a confidential source's name in a file name.
On deadline
Long recordings are split into chunks and processed in parallel, so a long interview finishes well before its running time; a ten-minute file takes about a minute or two. You can upload several files at once after a day of interviews. For more on recording interviews well, see the interview transcription page; for statements posted on YouTube, the YouTube news and speech transcript pages.