Uses This

1277 interviews since 2009

A picture of Annie Minoff

Annie Minoff

Producer (The Journal)

in mac, podcaster, producer

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Annie Minoff, and I make podcasts! Technically, I'm a producer, which can mean a lot of things in the audio world. For me, it means I spend a lot of time talking to potential podcast guests, recording interviews, and then figuring out the best way to structure that tape into a compelling narrative. That's the idea anyway.

I used to do this for a public radio show called Science Friday. I hosted and produced a podcast for them about the backstories of scientific discovery called Undiscovered. And now I work at Gimlet Media, where I help make their show The Journal. It's a daily news show about money, business, and power that we make with The Wall Street Journal. So now I get to work inside a newspaper, which is fun.

What hardware do you use?

These days, I get to use the WSJ and Gimlet audio studios, which I know technically very little about as I didn't have to set them up! But back in Undiscovered days, we used a closet Science Friday had converted into a little office studio. It worked pretty well! The "nice mic" pictured is a Neumann TLM 102.

A closet office studio for Science Friday..

I edit audio on a MacBook Pro.

Also, this is not exactly hardware, but it is the product I plug most often and with genuine enthusiasm: Softie covers. They are literally these ridiculous little chenille covers you put on your headphone earpieces to make them more comfy to wear! And I wear my Sony headphones pretty much all day every day, so I want to be comfy.

And what software?

I edit audio in a program called Pro Tools. In Pro Tools, a podcast episode looks like this, with the different colored bars representing stuff people said, or a sound effect, or music. A lot of my job is moving those little colored bars around.

Pro Tools, editing a podcast episode.

I write scripts in Google Docs. I love how collaborative it is. I use an app called Audio Hijack to record my phone calls and record audio off the internet. And I use either Trint or Rev to do my audio transcription. You pop an interview into Rev, and it'll generate this robot transcript of what everyone said, which is useful and occasionally hilarious. A teammate of mine recently rev'd an interview about Pete Buttigieg. And it produced this transcript all about Pete Booty Judge.

What would be your dream setup?

Hm. Pro Tools never crashing would be my dream setup. More immediately, I'm really interested in trying out this transcription service called Descript. Supposedly, it allows you to edit audio by editing text. So if a reporter said: "The coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is, um, a really big deal." I could just delete the um in the transcript and it would do it to the audio too. Pretty cool.