The audio black box 

I just started using Descript in my work as an author, journalist, and oral historian. I can’t believe that I didn’t know it existed when working on my last book, 24 Hours in Charlottesville, which required over 100 hours of recorded interviews.

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Most journalists and oral historians will record any interview they conduct so they can accurately transcribe exact quotes from the source and refer back to it later if the source ever denies saying something.

If you’ve ever seen a picture of reporters all huddled around a senator with their phones jammed toward her face, that’s why: they’re recording voice memos.

I almost never actually do anything with my audio recordings; I transcribe the quotes and then call it a day. 

But as I work on more longform projects, like books and magazine articles, I find I need those files in a format that’s easier to access. Sometimes that’s because I need to refer back to them months later, other times it’s because my fact-checkers and editors need to listen to a specific part.

At first, I didn’t think Descript could help me with this. Isn’t Descript a video and podcast editing program?

I wasn’t doing any kind of creative editing, or really editing at all. I just needed an easier way to organize all my audio files. And, in a perfect world, I’d love to be able to find specific quotes easily even if I didn’t remember who said them or when.

It turns out that Descript is a lot more than an editing program—it was the solution to my problem.

Soon, I started using Descript not only to organize and transcribe files, but also to lightly edit with the app’s many great features.

Here are a few of my favorite ways to use Descript in my work as an author, journalist, and oral historian.

Organizing and searching

Until recently, I kept all of my audio recordings in a folder on my computer, backed up to the cloud, labeled with interviewee name and date conducted. I had transcriptions in a separate folder, which got cumbersome.

In Descript, I can see all my recordings at a glance and easily search within their transcripts.

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Sometimes, I’ll remember that someone I interviewed had a great quote about the ominous way the sky looked one morning, for example, but not who said it. Now, it’s a lot easier to search all of my projects and find that one killer quote. 

Easily deleting “off the record” sections

As a journalist, sometimes my sources want to give me some extra context about an issue but don’t necessarily want me to quote them on it. In those cases, I’ll give them permission to go “off the record.”

For example, maybe I’m interviewing an activist about LGBTQ+ rights, which I do often. Perhaps the activist wants to warn me that a specific politician I’m interviewing later often skates around the truth, but they don’t want me to write in my article, “so-and-so activist says so-and-so politician is a liar” because they still have to work together. I might agree to go off-the-record for that section, because it’ll help me report the most accurate story. But, if I ever want future sources to trust me when I say something is off-the-record, I have to protect that source’s quote.

In Descript, it’s very easy for me to remove portions of an interview that were off-the-record before sending audio files to editors or fact checkers.

I used to have to listen to the entire, hours-long interview, to find the specific times we discussed going off the record for a few words here and there, and then manually edit them out. It took forever, and I was always scared I was going to miss something.

With Descript, it takes me literally 30 seconds to ctrl+F “off the record,” delete those sections, and re-export the file without them.

Lightly cleaning up

Using Descript for oral history interviews has also made it much easier to clean up long pauses that are common especially when interviewing older folks, as I'm doing for my next project about queer elders. I’m not actually editing what they’re saying, much less doing the kind of fancy audio editing I would for a podcast, but this simple “cleaning up” can make a big impact on the end product.

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I also use Descript to seamlessly record and edit introductions for oral history interviews, right within the program. Because these kinds of interviews are specifically meant for historic preservation, it’s important to note where and when each interview was conducted.

I used to separately set up a microphone, record my ten second intro (“This is an oral history interview conducted on October 1, 2023 in New York City with Jane Doe,” for example), and then import the audio and edit it all together with the main interview. Now, I can just easily record within Descript and pop it onto the beginning without any extra work. 

Final thoughts

Using Descript as a journalist, author, and oral historian has been a game-changer for my work process, and I can imagine its usefulness to other professionals who rely on interviews, like academic researchers and ethnographers. Especially for folks who aren’t professional audio editors, Descript is a great way to free up some more time for what you really love.