AI for Journalists
Transcription is the one that changed the job: interviews that took an afternoon to type now take minutes. Research and production tools help too. Generation is where the profession has an actual ethics problem, and this page draws that line explicitly rather than pretending the tools are neutral.
Interviews and transcription
The clearest time saving available to any reporter. Accuracy is good enough that you correct rather than type, though never good enough to quote from without checking the audio.
- Otter.aiFREEMIUM~$17/mo
Cheap, fast, and the free tier covers occasional interviews. The default for most reporters.
- DescriptFREEMIUM~$24/mo
Edit the audio by editing the transcript. Built for producing as well as transcribing, which suits anyone filing audio or video.
- AssemblyAIFREEMIUM~$20/mo
The API option when you are transcribing at volume or building it into a newsroom workflow. Strong on speaker labelling.
- Fireflies.aiFREEMIUM~$18/mo
Automatic recording and summaries for the calls that were meetings rather than interviews.
Research and verification
Finding the document, then reading the document. Everything here is a route to a primary source, and the second half of that sentence is the part that keeps you employed.
- PerplexityFREEMIUM~$20/mo
Fast cited orientation on an unfamiliar story, with links to follow. Where you start, never what you cite.
- NotebookLMFREE$0
Drop in a 900-page report, a FOI release or a set of filings and question those documents only, with answers pointing at the page.
- ClaudeFREEMIUM~$20/mo
Reads very long documents closely — the transcript, the accounts, the leaked bundle — and summarises without much invention.
- Semantic ScholarFREE$0
Free, and the fastest way to check whether the study a press release is touting is real and how it was received.
- ConsensusFREEMIUM~$12/mo
When a scientific claim needs the weight of published evidence rather than one paper a source sent you.
Writing and editing
Assistive only. These are for the mechanics — tightening, headline options, spotting the repeated word — not for producing copy that goes out under your byline.
- GrammarlyFREEMIUM~$12/mo
Catches what you stop seeing on the fourth read, at speed, on deadline.
- QuillBotFREEMIUM~$10/mo
Useful for tightening an overlong passage or rephrasing your own sentence when it will not sit right.
- ChatGPTFREEMIUM~$20/mo
Headline and standfirst options, structural suggestions, and a fast second opinion on whether a paragraph is clear.
Audio, video and repurposing
Getting one story onto several platforms without a production team.
- Adobe PodcastFREEMIUM~$10/mo
Rescues a badly recorded interview. The speech enhancement is genuinely close to a studio re-record.
- KrispFREEMIUM~$12/mo
Removes background noise live, which matters for a phone interview from a train.
- OpusClipFREEMIUM~$15/mo
Pulls short vertical clips out of a long interview and captions them, which is otherwise an hour of editing per clip.
- CanvaFREEMIUM~$15/mo
Social cards, graphics and simple charts for a story, without waiting on a designer.
- ElevenLabsFREEMIUM~$22/mo
Audio versions of written pieces. Read the disclosure point below before using a synthetic voice anywhere near a real person's.
Never publish a quotation you have not checked against the recording — transcription errors are small, plausible and legally expensive. Never let a model generate a fact, a name, a date or a citation that reaches print unverified; the failure mode is confident invention, not obvious error. Never use a synthetic voice or generated image of a real person without labelling it, and check your outlet's policy before you do it at all. Source protection is the other half: a confidential recording uploaded to a consumer transcription service has left your control, and a consumer tier may train on it. If a source's safety depends on it, transcribe locally.
How to pick AI tools as a journalist
Buy transcription first and treat everything else as optional. It is the only tool on this page that removes hours rather than minutes, and for most reporters $10 to $20 a month is the entire justified spend. Whether you want Otter or Descript comes down to whether you also produce audio — Descript's transcript-based editing is worth the higher price only if you are cutting tape.
For research, the distinction that matters is whether the tool answers from your documents or from the internet. NotebookLM answering from a report you uploaded is checkable: it points at a page you can open. A general model answering about the report from training data is not, and that is where invented detail enters a story. On any document-led investigation, upload the documents.
Take the source-protection question seriously before it is urgent. Cloud transcription is fine for a council meeting and wrong for a whistleblower. Decide the rule now — which material never leaves your machine — rather than in the moment when you have an interview to file.
Prices on this page are per month at single-user rates. Several of the most useful tools here cost nothing: NotebookLM, Semantic Scholar, and the free tiers of Otter, Perplexity and Claude cover a lot of real reporting.
AI for journalists: common questions
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