interview-transcription

Interview transcription and management

Practical workflows for journalists managing interviews from preparation through publication.

When to activate

• Preparing questions for an interview
• Processing audio/video recordings
• Creating or managing transcripts
• Organizing notes from multiple sources
• Building a source relationship database
• Generating timestamped quotes for fact-checking
• Converting recordings to publishable quotes

Recording setup for transcription

For pre-interview research, question design, attribution agreements, and consent scripts, use the interview-prep skill. The notes here cover only the recording configuration that affects transcription quality.

# Standard recording configuration for clean transcription
RECORDING_SETTINGS = {
    'format': 'wav',           # Lossless for transcription
    'sample_rate': 16000,      # Whisper resamples to 16k anyway; 16k saves disk
    'channels': 1,             # Mono is fine for speech; stereo only if mics are positionally distinct
    'backup': True,            # Always run a backup recorder
}

# File naming convention
# YYYY-MM-DD_source-lastname_topic.wav
# Example: 2026-05-08_smith_budget-hearing.wav

Two-device rule. Always record on two devices. Phone as backup minimum. If using a wireless lav mic, the recorder built into the lav unit is one device; the phone running a backup app is the second.

Mono is preferred unless each speaker has their own dedicated microphone routed to a distinct channel. Stereo with both speakers bleeding into both channels is worse for diarization than clean mono.

Transcription workflows

Automated transcription pipeline

Vanilla OpenAI Whisper transcribes audio to text but does not assign speaker labels. To get diarized output ("Speaker 1:" / "Speaker 2:" / etc.) you need a tool that combines Whisper with a diarization model, typically WhisperX (m-bain/whisperX), which wraps faster-whisper transcription with pyannote.audio diarization and produces word-level timestamps with speaker IDs in one pass.