Speaker 1: Please listen carefully to these messages.

Speaker 2: We got a whole lot of good material. It is so important to remember. Mark my words. Mark my words.

Speaker 1: Hi there, I'm Austin Bundy, researcher for NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, and this is NBCU Academy. Today we're going to talk to you about the top tips for logging under deadline. Logging is the bread and butter of any news package. We want to be able to take what they say at events and be able to have that in a written form with time codes, so we know what they said, when they said it, and we can pick the best bytes to use in our packages. The best bytes are the most newsy sound bytes from the event that we transcribed.

Speaker 3: Logging can take you very far. If I'm interviewing a producer candidate and they are already giving me examples of how they already know how to log, so that they walk in day one already with those tools, that puts them ahead of the pack automatically.

Speaker 1: Whenever I get a request from a producer to log something, I know what the producer is going to expect me to find for elements. And elements are the sound bytes. Those are the visuals that the producer is going to want to show in the piece in order to get the news of the day across. If you're not in a newsroom setting, there are some free tools that you can use like Otter.ai, Google Voice, and Apple Dictation.

Speaker 2: Logging is super important because nine times out of ten, especially if you're crashing, you don't have time to look at all of the footage that's available. Whoever's logging, what you bring my attention to is what I'm going to go to. When logging, I always say more is more. Even if you're under the gun, make it as concise as possible. Flag the good bytes. You need the highlights. You need the underlines. As you log, you'll get used to knowing what is good audio. So definitely talk to your producers. Ask them what you're looking for and get those things ahead of time.

Speaker 1: When a producer asks me to log something for the piece, I'll take my laptop with our Avid video system, my phone that has Otter.ai transcribing the tool, I'll take it into a quiet space, let Otter transcribe the audio or the video as it rolls. I want to follow up with you on working with Republicans. If you're hand-logging something, there's a reason it's called a rough log. You want to be able to write down key phrases and words and speaker changes. The senior will come back to us and say, here are the bytes from the interview that we need to make sure are verbated, which is the exact wording from the interview. So we'll go back and listen to it and make sure that the closed captioning was correct.

Speaker 3: The correspondence time can be limited, whether they're covering multiple stories or on assignment or on a shoot. They need everything as soon as possible. What's important is that everything is clearly laid out for them, so they can just hit the ground running when they write their story, so they have anything pertinent to help them tell the story.

Speaker 1: Some key mistakes some people could make with logging is not paying attention to the time codes in the auto-transcription or any transcription tool compared to whatever system your company is using. Always make sure that they match with what your company is using. Always make sure that you go back and listen if somebody needs something accurate, that the speaker's words are accurate. The best way for someone to practice logging, especially rough logging, is to find something that you can listen to or watch on TV. Grab a laptop and just write down key phrases and parts of sentences that you hear someone say while glancing at the clock every minute or two to get those military time codes.

Speaker 2: Watch press conferences. Watch live events. Practice. See what things you would want to put in a piece. Practice flagging the good bites. Practice typing under pressure. Practice organizing what a good log you think would look like.

Speaker 1: That way when you come into work and somebody needs you to do a rough log quickly, it's the same exact thing. Young journalists should take logging seriously as much as it can be tedious because later in your career, if you become a researcher, a producer, or even a correspondent, you're not going to be able to remember everything you ask somebody or everything somebody said in a speech.