From the desk of Robert Rappaport on Friday, August 21st 2009 at 10:34

FREE TRANSCRIPTS

It took a long time, but now you can get NPR transcripts online, relatively fast and totally free.

When NPR launched its new Web site last month, it made LOTS of changes. Some of these are still being rolled out slowly, including the offer of free transcripts for stories that have audio. As the NPR Ombudsman writes:

Transcripts of favorite, missed or maddening stories on NPR used to cost $3.95 each, but now they are free on NPR.org.

Previously, NPR charged for transcripts because an outside contractor worked fast to prepare them to be available to the library within a few hours of a piece airing. It was a costly expense which NPR did for the benefit of classrooms and deaf audiences, or anyone who wrote to Listener Services and was willing to pay.

As of the new NPR.org site re-launch on July 27, over 20,000 visitors had gone online to get transcripts.

Now, all you have to do to get a story's text is visit NPR.org and click on the transcript link to the right of the audio button, located just below the story's title.

NPR says the popularity of social media and the public's appetite for news-on-demand made it clear that transcript seekers are no longer "the province of librarians and other specialists whose job was to find archival content, often for professional purposes."

There is this humorous caveat from the NPR blog documenting the change:

Transcripts may contain minor or significant errors, ranging from the use of "ex-patriot" instead of "expatriate." In another example, a transcriber mistakenly quoted filmmaker John Waters as saying of former Manson follower Leslie Van Houten: "She's a yuppie," when what he really said was, "She's not a yuppie."

Transcript coordinators "Dorothy Hickson and Laura Jeffrey do their best to find and correct errors but unfortunately, they cannot proofread every piece," said Soto-Barra. "Librarians and transcript coordinators appreciate when someone calls their attention to errors, particularly when they involve name spellings and use of (unintelligible)."

You can read the entire blog here.

Does this change mean anything locally? No, it does not. However, we will be rolling out some text versions of our daily stories in the not-too-distant-future. We're coming up with a system now and I've been assigned the task of figuring out how to make it all happen (in conjunction with our programming gurus). The stories will not simply be scripts of what you heard, but stories developed especially for the Web. Stay tuned!

Neil Collins @ Sep 6, 2009

I am listening to the show, now and would be very interested in finding out name of the gentleman [and the title of his book] who was just on, talking about corporatization and having gotten mugged and blogged about it, only to have homeowners berate him for mentioning where it happened. I would also like to know the name of the gentleman before him.
Thank you so much, keep up the good work.
sincerely, neil a. collins

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