To tape or not to tape ... wait, really?

A look back at a most intriguing low-stakes journalism debate

Old textbooks are fascinating source material. 

They are often a student’s first real introduction to a profession. It’s where the basic norms, practices, values, roles and routines of a field like journalism are first presented. Students imprint on this, carrying many of these lessons into their careers for good and for bad.¹

Organizational sociology tells us that university training or other formal education is one of the primary sources of professionalism, the series of shared norms, practices and values that cut across individual organizations and are a part of a profession.²

I’ve been re-reading old journalism textbooks for my large-scale, hopefully-a-book research project into the history of sports journalism. It’s largely inspired by the work Dave Karpf is doing by re-reading old Wired Magazines. 

And one thing has jumped out at me looking back at these textbooks: The amount of time they spent discussing the pros and cons of taping interviews. 

The question was should a journalist use a tape recorder for interviews, or rely just on notes? 

Give me a pencil and 20 minutes and I’d be back in business. Photo by Caroline Veronez on Unsplash

Seriously, this was an open question in a lot of journalism textbooks from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s.

I’m co-author of a forthcoming sports journalism textbook³, and in the chapters on reporting I wrote, I never thought about this as something to address. It seems like a moot point — of course you record. Why wouldn’t you?

Two recent journalism textbooks I checked - Joe Gisondi’s excellent Field Guide to Covering Sports, and the essential Multimedia Sports Journalism, written by a team featuring my former podcast host Galen Clavio - don’t mention this debate once. 

But I read three older texts — Fred Fedler’s Reporting for the Print Media⁴ from 1993, Steve Wilstein’s AP Sports Writing Handbook from 2002, and Robert S. Boynton’s The New New Journalism⁵ from 2005 — and all three had significant space dedicated to the “to tape or not to tape” question. Wilstein’s book dedicated four full pages (out of 195 total) to it. Fedler spent a whole 8 ½-by-11 page to this in his book.

I don’t come here to mock the question or the answers, or to make fun of the fact that this was an issue. This isn’t a “look how these losers talked about the brand new internet in 1996” type of post, because talking about it made sense at the time.

And it’s not to re-open up this question for debate. The correct answer now, as it was then, was “whatever works best for you.”

But the fact that this was an actual debate, an open question, a part of core journalism education, is endlessly fascinating to me. It’s so delightfully low stakes, and I think it tells us a lot about how journalists saw their role and their work.

The three books I mentioned above yielded nearly 11 pages of notes and quotes on the “to tape or not tape” question. I boiled these down to three general themes; technological, transcribing, and philosophical. 

Technological

Richard Preston:

First of all, I’m a mechanical idiot and tape recorders always seem to break on me.

Steve Wilstein:

Even if you use a recorder, it’s a good idea to take notes as a backup to a malfunctioning machine, dead batteries, or some other mishap. That’s a lesson I learned in my first taped interview when I slyly, and foolishly, placed the recorder on the chair between me and New York Knicks center Willis Reed at a restaurant. When I played back the tape, all I heard were muffled voices and the clatter of silverware. I hadn’t been concentrating on taking notes, but fortunately I had written enough and remembered enough of what he said so that the inaudible tape didn’t matter.

Technological issues were a theme in these interviews, and in talking to people on Threads about this.

And here’s the thing They’re not wrong. 

This feels like a silly question now that \we are all carrying around professional recording studios 24/7 that have near endless space to save interviews and nearly endless battery life to record them. 

But understanding time and place, and the technology we had back then, give important context.

The microcassette recorders of the late 1990s and early 2000s were finicky little buggers. Remember, this was 100 percent analog. We were recording onto physical tapes that held maybe an hour of interviews. The recorders used Double-A batteries. The microphones were … well there was a microphone there, but not the best quality. 

The finest photo of a microcassette recorder the Wikipedia Commons has to offer.

On a more basic level, in 2024 you always have your phone on you so you always have a recorder on you. Back in the day, it was one more thing you had to remember to pack, along with tapes and batteries and headphones.

Every reporter from that generation has a horror story of tape recording failing, whether it’s not being able to clearly hear the the person you were interviewing, or having their batteries die without having a backup set, or a tape getting eaten, or hitting the end of the tape and not knowing it in the middle of the interview. 

So it makes sense that back then, reporters were a little hesitant about using recorders. But it is telling how often one bad experience, or a perceived bad experience, or hearing about a bad experience second or third hand, soured reporters on a new technology. 

Transcribing

Fred Fedler:

The use of tape recorders requires too much time. After taping a one hour interview, reporters would have to play the entire one hour tape at least once, and perhaps two or three times, before writing their stories. It might also be difficult to find a particular fact or quotation in the tape. By comparison, reporters can read their handwritten notes in a few minutes and find a particular fact or quotation in a few seconds.

Susan Orlean:

So much of the time I spend with people is just spent blabbing. I talk about a lot of stuff that isn’t at all relevant to the story, just so I can get a sense of why they are. I can spend hours talking to a subject about something like  makeup. Do I really want to transcribe hours and hours of tape of that?

Wilstein:

The main drawback to tape recording interviews is speed and convenience. It often takes three or four times as long to transcribe a tape as it does to conduct the interview, even with the  use of a transcription machine equipped with a foot pedal. Even if you are transcribing only highlights, it can take a long time to go through it all. I have spent a large chunk of my career transcribing interviews, mostly for features and investigative series, and it is the most tedious,  time-consuming part of the job. …  For beat writers covering a game, there’s usually no time to listen to tapes and transcribe everything, though a tape can provide a good backup to notes if it’s necessary to review a quote. 

I have felt this objection very deeply.

My dissertation consisted of 25 in-depth interviews, which meant more than 100 hours of transcription. When I was a sports reporter, I lived what Wilstein describes. An extra-innings game on a tight Saturday night deadline didn’t leave you time to transcribe the tape. You got in the clubhouse, scribbled some notes, got out and filed ASAP.

That was the reality of the business. Although I will acknowledge the weird juxtaposition that I didn’t feel like I had the time to listen to tape to (checks notes⁶) check the accuracy of the quotes I was using in print. But that is also a larger issue about deadlines and the systems of daily sports journalism rather than individual behavior.

This is also another thing best understood through the lens of time and place. On an iPhone, it’s easy to scrub back and forth in an audio file to get to the point of the interview you need. On a tape recorder, it was so much rewind play, rewind, play, fast forward, too much, back too far, back up, play again. 

Wilstein was right about it being the most tedious, time consuming part of the job.

But most writers will also tell you that the time spent transcribing is time well spent, because it immerses you in the interview and helps you feel comfortable in your reporting.

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that many of the magazine writers talked about having research assistants who transcribed their interview tapes, or that the magazine would pay for someone to do it for them. Which is a whole other conversation about privilege and work and labor, but suffice it to say, the 1990s and early 2000s were a different time in journalism.

Philosophical

Michael Wilbon:

I take notes and hardly ever tape record. The key is to listen. Some people are so busy getting quotes, they’re not listening. There’s no conversation going on. People should listen for more information and not just the sound bite. We are all into sound bite mode now.

Ira Berkow:

A lot of times guys tape people and, since they know they’re getting it, their mind sort of drifts. I am giving total attention, so I’m getting the way the ballplayer looks, the way he shrugs. I’ve seen guys tape people in interviews in lockler rooms and they’re sort of looking away. They have the tape extended with other people around and they’re dreaming about something else. Well, here I’m watching this guy, watching his movements, listening to what he says and responding to him. I see a lot of people sometimes don’t even respond to some of the things that are said.

Alex Kotlowitz:

It makes me a lazy interviewer. When you’re taking notes, it forces you to concentrate on what you’re hearing, to think of the next question.

Richard Preston:

A tape recorder cannot capture a scene. A scene is kinesthetic: it has sound, smell, sight, and emotional environment all around it. The way a person is dressed, the way he’s behaving, the weather, the natural environment — none of that is captured by a tape recorder. Whereas in a notebook, you can take down all of these kinds of details. 

Lawrence Weschler:

Actually, the tape recorder falsifies the situation in two ways. First of all its presence falsifies the encounter. As any writer knows, the moment you turn the tape recorder off you get all the really good stuff. And that is even true in those cases where it seems that it no longer matters, that the person is completely relaxed about the thing’s presence 

The second way in which a tape recorder falsifies the record is that the transcript is an entirely false record of what has taken place between a subject and a journalist. For what is actually taking place is a series of communication events, which really makes it a symphonic interaction. These include your expression, my response to your expression (seeing you are board, interested, excited), my voice going up, my voice going down, your voice going up your voice going down … and none of that is conveyed in a flat transcript. The words themselves don’t approximate what actually took place between us. Phrased differently, what took place between us was a narrative, a story, and a transcript is not a story.

This was the part I was most interested in, because it speaks to bigger, deeper issues than just “my batteries ran out that one time” or “I don’t have time to transcribe on deadline.” 

What’s interesting is that a lot of what is presented as anti-taping is really just good interview advice. Pay attention to the other person. Engage in a conversation with them. Don’t look for a quote, look to learn some new information. Pay attention to the room around you. Report with all of your senses. 

Some of the reporters were very confident in their ability to get the quote if not perfect than close enough. And for some of the reporters, particularly the magazine ones in The New New Journalism, that was the point. It’s not that they didn’t care about accuracy. They did. But for some of them, the spirit of the quote, what the person meant to saw was more important than the actual verbatim perfect quote.

The general vibe in this area is that taping creates a barrier between a journalist and their source, between a journalist and their work. What’s striking when you read it with 20-30 years distance is not that it’s wrong or bad.

It’s that the language they use is strikingly similar to the language you saw when journalists using social media in their reporting, when they started shooting video in addition to their usual interviews. And that’s the big point. Any technological development that pulls reporters farther away from the perceived platonic ideal of what journalism should be is seen as a negative. 

The final word

Jon Krakauer’s answer to this surprised me in how much I found it still made sense today: 

I’ve conducted an experiment that I would encourage any journalist to try. Do an interview in which you simultaneously use a tape recorder and take notes by hand. Then transcribe your tapes and compare this to the handwritten notes. Often you may get the intent or the meaning right, but you miss the idiosyncratic phrasing, the precise inflections, the unique qualities that make a quote ring true. Quotes not based on a taped interview often sound more like the writer than the interview subject. 

I don’t want to miss anything. When I tape and take notes, the person I’m interviewing usually thinks I’m using the tape as a backup. In fact, most of what I’m writing down are my observations: what the guy is wearing, the way his eyes dart, the nervous ways he pulls at his earlobes. If I’m not using a tape recorder, I have to focus all my attention on writing down what the subject says, making it impossible for me to make these other crucial observations. I don’t think anyone can do both things at once, no matter how fast they are at shorthand. 

1. I’m convinced that so many people resist any changes to AP Style, despite the fact that language and punctuation evolve over time and should evolve over time, because they did great on AP Style quizzes in college and take a certain amount of their identity from being someone who was good at AP Style quizzes. 

2. See The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields by DiMaggio and Powell.

3.  Um, surprise?! More on this later in the year.

4. This was the textbook I used in Dr. Steven Koski’s Journalism 106 news writing class my freshman year at St. Bonaventure. Fun fact,

Jared Paventi

was in that class with me. I bet he didn’t keep that book for 28 years like I did.

5. Important context: This book features interviews with longform magazine reporters and book authors. The Gay Talese, Susan Orlean level writers. They are working on a very different level than most sports reporters. But these writers are also seen as the best of the best, the aspirational idealized peak of journalism, which is why I think their answers are useful.

6. See what I did there?