Chip on Your Shoulder

Whether or not a tape recorder is superior to note-taking by hand is one of the enduring newsroom debates.

But first, before the arguing begins, a little history:

On May 6, 1937, Herb Morrison, a reporter for a Chicago radio station, was in a New Jersey field recording the arrival of the German dirigible Hindenburg, using a primitive machine that recorded voices on a wire coated with a magnetic substance. When the hydrogen gas-filled metal-frame airship exploded in flames, killing 36 people, the reporter's emotion-filled narration became the first recorded material broadcast on a radio network, according to journalism historian Mitchell Stephens. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the victorious Allies discovered that the Germans had developed a machine that could record voices on a coated paper tape. That invention eventually replaced the wire recorder and led to the magnetic tape recorders used today. (Ed Ellers, whose knowledge of technological history outstrips mine, has posted a challenging comment, to which I've added a link featuring an account written by Jack Mullin who made the "discovery."

Before then, newspaper reporters could only scribble to record their observations, quotes and other information collected during their reporting. Many reporters today carry tape recorders as part of their basic reporting equipment.

"Without a tape recorder, you really can't capture the full emotional breadth of what people are saying to you," says Mitch Albom, the Detroit Free Press sports columnist. "When you're talking to a grieving family, the way they say things, sometimes even a small little sentence, or the way their voice trails off is very important to re-create the mood and the spirit."

In such sensitive reporting situations or when a verbatim transcript is essential, many reporters share Albom's fear: "I don't trust my penmanship to try to get it down." That fear of missing something important, especially in an electronic era when radio and television crews are recording news events, prompts many reporters to use the tape recorder as a backup to their handwritten notes. The advent of new media, and the convergence of news reporting technologies, also means that today's reporters may be asked to provide sound for their story.

Journalistic lore is rich with stories about reporters whose tape recorders failed or who couldn't take notes until after they had left the interview. In those cases, the reporters wrote down or dictated into a tape recorder everything they could remember from the interview. Reporters ask whether they can use verbatim quotes reconstructed from memory. Some reporters do it, but having used a tape recorder for much of my career I'm less likely to trust my memory. Bear in mind that working from memory is one of the most common causes of journalistic inaccuracy.

Mark Thompson, Time Magazines's Pentagon correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner, and my former colleague in the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, makes this pro-taping argument:

"After nearly 30 years of reporting, I find that the key attribute of tape recording is rarely mentioned: When scribbling notes, one tends to be too busy transcribing instead of listening. The use of a recorder lets the reporter listen carefully to what his/her subject is saying and come up with far better follow-up questions than is possible while concentrating on getting Answer 1 right instead of coming up with Question 2."

I agree, although my principle reason for taping interviews is the abysmal quality of my note-taking and penmanship. Over the years, I've used a variety of tape recorders: Sony Walkman recorders, even an expensive minicassette model with a clip-on microphone that supposedly was standard issue at the Central Intelligence Agency. In August, when Catholic Digest assigned me to write a day-in-the-life profile of a parish priest who's a star on Spanish language television, I considered going high-tech and buying a mindisc recorder like the ones wielded by public radio journalists, but I wimped out and bought the latest in a series of inexpensive Radio Shack models that have always stood me in good stead.

It's not necessary to spend large amounts of money. Just make sure that whatever model you buy is equipped with a counter. That way if you hear something you know you may want to use, you can note the place on the counter and find it without having to listen to the whole tape. Remember to reset the counter to 000 when you turn the tape over or insert a new tape. The counter feature is especially important for broadcast and online journalists who need to locate quotes precisely.

Not everyone likes the tape recorder. "The machine, surprisingly, distorts the truth," argues Lillian Ross, a profile writer for The New Yorker. "The tape recorder is a fast and easy and lazy way of getting a lot of talk down ... A lot of talk does not in itself make an interview."

Ross and other critics say recorders encourage laziness in reporting.

Of course, reporters who don't want to use a tape recorder don't have to, although they often feel compelled to justify why using a machine for an interview is a bad idea. Tape recorders break, tapes and batteries run out, a siren goes by, drowning out all sound just as the subject whispers, "Yes, I did it. I embezzled the animal shelter's cash fund." Even if you get all the quotes, the tape still takes forever to transcribe. All these arguments are valid.

Still, even technology-averse reporters wish they had a tape recorder going during some interviews, especially when the pace is fast or the content compelling. It's estimated that even a speedy note-taker can get down only 25 to 30 words a minute, a fraction of the 100 words a minute of a normal conversation.

Matt Schudel, arts critic for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., prefers a notebook, but when he interviewed Southern writer Reynolds Price for a magazine profile, he said "I was glad I had a tape recorder to convey the beauty of his spoken words." Even so, Schudel believes he listens more attentively when he takes notes. "I have to be an active listener. I ask better questions and participate more fully in the conversation."

Even tape recorder fans know better than to put all their notes in one medium, however. Albom notes that "I work with a notepad even with the tape recorder, because I don't trust technology."

It can be equally dangerous to trust the human ear. I once covered a speech by journalist and grammarian Edwin Newman along with a reporter for the local campus daily. I had a tape recorder. The student reporter, I assume, did not.

Compare the two versions of the same speech:

Recorded Version:

People like Edwin Newman because he makes them laugh. He does that by making fun of "the jargon, the mush, the smog, the dull pompous, boneless, gassy language" that afflicts the world today.

Unrecorded Version:

"We have no hope of dealing with things unless we dig ourselves out of the smog, the bog, the hash and the jargon. ..."

The bottom line: Smart reporters learn how to take accurate, detailed notes by hand and use the tape recorder in those instances when a verbatim record is valued (such as press conferences or other events where electronic media are present). As a 21st-century journalist, you may also be required to collect audio to post on your website.

[Do you use a tape recorder? Why or why not?]