Technically? So what’s so tricky about publishing an online transcript of a half-hour TV program? Don’t you just have someone transcribe the tape and the dump the transcript into a web page? Well, yes and no.
We have occasionally transcribed the tape in-house, but it is a tedious process and the person doing it has to set aside everything else for pretty much the rest of the day. Instead we “use the right tool for the job.” Voice-recognition software? Not yet, though it’s much more practical now than it was three years ago. Instead we send an audio feed from the 10 a.m. taping via telephone hybrid (a Gentner box) to a court reporter at her home. With a headset on her ears and her fingers on a stenographer’s keyboard she generates text at rates exceeding 100 words per minute.
We also send a second audio feed to an automated despostion system which works like a voice-mail with hours-long message capacity. She then checks her on-the-fly transcription against the digital recording in the automated system. We get the transcript via e-mail, match reporter names with reporter questions, check the document against the video tape, generate html and post to the web. On a good day the whole process takes about four hours.
Fiscal benefit? It is less expensive for us to produce the transcript than to buy an underwriting announcement on the program, so we get the value of being associated with the broadcast at a relatively low cost.
Media benefit? Print reporters can readily access extensive direct quotations of the Governor’s responses, and broadcast reporters can see their “sound bites” in a written form which speeds the editing process and provides context. And reporters do use it. On more than one occasion we’ve had media inquires asking, “Is the transcript ready yet?”
Benefits to staff, educators, students, stakeholders, and the general public? The immediacy and accessibility of the web, the objectivity of a full transcript, and the historical / research value of a permanent archive.
"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787
Comment / Question: Interesting. This is the first I had heard of "Blogging". Are you certain this isn't some perverse act first done on television by "Monty Python? Actually, this may solve a business need I have.
p.s. Found while looking for something else: Recording Technology History
