Let's talk transcription tools
What's the best option for journalists in the year of our lord 2025?
My first real journalism gig, as a production assistant for the NPR affiliate owned by my college, was basically a transcription job. The summer after I graduated (amid the pandemic in 2020), the station sent me home with a foot pedal and 320 episodes of “Rock Island Lines” a local history program from the ‘90s, on a stack of CDs. I carefully transcribed each episode and copied it into the CMS, scheduling posts out years in advance as a weekly podcast re-release. The freight train horn and steamboat calliope each episode opens with is still burned into my brain.
Just after I finished the work, I first discovered Otter.ai, an automated transcription tool. I tried putting a few episodes through it, but it didn’t do a great job and they had to be played into a microphone in real time, which didn’t save me a whole lot of time.
The following year, trying to break into audio reporting, I joined AIR (a great organization) and successfully pitched my first story. I think my AIR mentor recommended using Otter.ai to transcribe my interviews and make scriptwriting easier. So I gave it another shot and decided to fork over the $50/year for a subscription so I'd have unlimited transcription minutes and could upload .mp3 and .wav files instead of playing my interviews back into a microphone. There was a lot to like—the price was right, the transcriptions were (fairly) accurate, you could click anywhere on the transcript to play audio, tag speakers and search across all your interviews.
I’ve used Otter.ai for dozens of stories since then. But increasingly, it feels like Otter isn’t for me—like it’s trying to be something else or for someone else. It wants to summarize my interviews and give me “action items,” which can be quite funny (“Bretwood to follow up with Bretwood” “Reach out to Christian Elliott” (that’s me)). An AI assistant wants to attend my “meetings,” answer questions and, insultingly, copy bits of my transcripts directly into ChatGPT. These are all things I absolutely do not want. Also, the service is occasionally down entirely, leaving me unable to access my transcripts at all, sometimes with looming deadlines. Basically, enshittification has come for Otter.ai.
Oh and even worse, the price has doubled and now there’s a 10 upload/month limit. Which means I’m paying way more for a worse service. And I do think it’s objectively worse—my transcripts are getting less and less accurate as the site grows increasingly unusable. I’m sure other journalists can relate—a useful journalism tool has now become a robot secretary for summarizing corporate meetings. It’s an “enterprise product,” not a website for freelancers.
So for a while I’ve been on a quest for a replacement. Trint is probably the industry standard, but it costs $624/year, which makes Otter.ai look affordable in comparison. Descript is cheaper at $144/year, but it’s full of AI podcast and video editing tools I don’t need. Notta seems OK? But it’s also primarily a meeting summarizer, not a journalism tool. And there are dozens of other meeting-focused transcription bots that are even more egregious—a friend of mine’s tech company uses one that ranks speakers in meetings by how much they spoke up, how “compassionate” they sounded and even how “biased” they were, which is actually insane. What does that even mean?
Anyway, I think I’ve finally found a tool I like. It’s called Scroll.ai—a friend suggested it to me when I was complaining on Bluesky a month ago. The company is a little mysterious and the website’s a bit sparse, but they have a privacy and security policy about ethical AI use and data ownership, which seems good. And there’s a contact email, hello@scroll.ai. So of course, while procrastinating, I reached out. The founder, Elik Eizenberg, told me, “We plan to evolve Scroll into a more mature research platform for writers. This will include better writing tools, additional AI capabilities, and mobile apps. The tool will always have a generous free tier, especially for independent writers like yourself.” Elik seemed genuinely interested in getting feature suggestions from the community.
I’m admittedly sucker for a tool made for journalists. A year or so ago I moved my personal website from WordPress to JournoPortfolio, a website builder specifically for journalists. It imports your stories and backs them up automatically, making adding new clips to your site pretty painless. Scroll.ai seems similarly useful. The transcription itself is really accurate (and fast), you can tag speakers like with Otter.ai, and there’s a neat notebook feature that lets you import any combination of sources—from webpages to PDFs to audio files to YouTube videos—and highlight bits of those sources to all appear in one place. I could see it being a pretty useful research tool for reporting and organizing sources.
And best of all, it’s simple, straightforward and bloat-free—for now. They’ve only been in business since 2023, so some enshittification (and a paid tier) is probably inevitable. It looks like they’ve already added an Otter.ai-style “assistant” in the last month. And it’s a black box, like every other transcription tool. There’s no way to know how it’s working on the backend. Is it just running Open AI’s Whisper ASR API in the background? Anytime you’re uploading audio files to a website for a transcription, you don’t really know where they’re going. I wouldn’t upload sensitive interviews to Scroll.ai, Otter.ai or anywhere else. But unless you have Adobe Premiere or some other software that transcribes locally, I’m not sure what alternatives exist. And if you do have an Adobe subscription, you’re probably not a freelancer in need of a cheap tool.
I’ve been thinking about all this a lot since catching Simon Adler’s live Radiolab show about the history of closed captioning at On Air Fest in February (which I really hope they release publicly sometime). Closed captioning used to be a human-powered industry. Transcribing speech, especially in real time, is a serious technical skill. Auto transcription tools have been around for a while (I was using Otter.ai long before the generative AI boom of the last couple years), but this new wave of AI has thrown the transcription industry into chaos. These tools have made journalism work easier, but I have mixed feelings in general about the human impact of Otter.ai, Scroll.ai and so on. And don’t get me started about Google’s Notebook LLM that turns text into a “podcast.”
Anyway, I’d love to hear from you—do you have a transcription tool you like? How do you think about the role of transcription in journalism? Leave a comment on this post!
Reading list
What I’ve been reading recently (and you might be interested in too):
Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money—but threatens a critical water source Muriel Alarcón, Grist)
Muriel is a good friend (and sometimes reporting partner) based in Santiago, Chile. Her new story (co-published with El País) about how locals are trying to protect water as lithium mining ramps up in the Atacama Desert is part of a new Grist series on mining called Unearthed.
Jeffrey Goldberg got the push notification of all push notifications—and a hell of a story (Joshua Benton, NiemanLab)
The story of the week (and probably in a saner world, of the year), was The Atlantic’s The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans. NiemanLab, as usual, has the story behind the story.
Inside Trump and Musk’s Takeover of NASA (David Brown, The New Yorker)
I’m sure I’ve mentioned David Brown in this newsletter before—I always enjoy his science reporting. I’m not sure if enjoy is the right word for this one, but if you’re looking for the definitive account of what’s going on inside NASA in this new presidential administration, this is it.
How the Klamath Dams Came Down (Anita Hofschneider and Jake Bittle, Grist)
Another Grist (and Underscore Native News in this case) series in the recommendations this week. If you missed it last year, tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest won a decades-long battle that resulted in the largest dam removal in U.S. history. Anita and Jake were there following along. This 5-part series is, again, a definitive account of how it went down.
An Interview With A Fired NOAA Director (Sabrina Imbler, Defector)
Sabrina Imbler needs no introduction. Sabrina typically writes beautiful odes to Earth’s weirdest creatures. But recently, they’ve been publishing Q&As with fired government scientists—EPA, USFWS, USDA, all the acronyms. It’s a really straightforward, (relatively) light lift way to highlight the important work these scientists do as things change so quickly.