NPR offers up free transcripts and an API

Transcripts of shows are a handy thing to be able to have access to but the majority of time these cost you a fair penny to get your hands on, as it was with NPR even though you could download audio of the shows for free. The reason for charging for transcripts is because it costs whoever is providing them money to have a 3rd party company do the transcribing.

NPR decided with its recent site redesign that they would bite the bullet on the cost of having the shows transcribed and make the transcriptions freely available on the NPR site.

NPR took the new website launch as an opportunity to offer free transcripts, according to Laura Soto-Barra, NPR’s Senior Librarian.

“We made a decision to go ahead even though NPR pays a considerable amount of money to produce transcripts on deadline,” said Soto-Barra. “Transcripts are posted six hours after the shows air, except for Morning Edition’s transcripts which are posted four hours after the show is broadcast. We have offered free audio for a long time and we felt that free transcripts were long overdue.”

As well there is also a Transcript API being made available that provides access to all of the NPR transcripts back to May, 2005

As of today, we are opening up over 80,000 transcripts through this API, and this number will grow with every new radio story we produce. This API contains the same transcripts that are now offered on the new NPR.org.