How the other half live: getting the transcribers in

An amusing spat at the end of last week between Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis and Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford.

Petridis tweeted that his interview with Take That was 'back from the transcribers' (including the frankly baffling exchange in the excerpt above), prompting Ponsford to blog:

Now call me naive, but I really had no idea that journalists did this. And it strikes me as rather risky. I would rather trust my own ears because if you get something wrong and it ends up in print, I don’t think lawyers will be too impressed by the excuse that “it was the transcriber’s fault”.

In fact it was Petridis who was none too impressed, firing back a series of increasingly irritated tweets pointing out that Ponsford had originally called him 'Alex' rather than 'Alexis', and culminating in:

and

If you're interested, it costs as little as 90p a minute and Petridis uses the services of a London-based transcription services company called Transcript Divas. Nuff said...