Flashes of Panic

I can carp and moan all I want (and I have) about the parts of interviewing that I don’t like, and for many reasons I’m not really a good interviewer in the way many of my peers and role models in this sub-profession are. But the part that really drives me nuts is not getting the raw material, but the very first step in refining it. Transcribing. Sitting down at the computer screen with a recorder (inevitably mono, so I have only one earpiece in) and distilling a low-quality voice recording into ASCII half-sentences at a time. Sometimes I get good at it. Most of the time it’s tedious, and I hate it.

Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that better equipment (a mic?) will help, but so far, it tends not to. I have found that even though A. and I have essentially the same digital recorder visually, mine (which was half the price) not only has significantly less memory, the quality is lower.