iOS: I love podcasts. I love them in my car; I love them when I’m working out. I’ll even put on a podcast when I’m in the shower — mainly to help me get through my way-too-large queue.

With audio transcription, you get what you pay for. For a dollar per minute of audio, Rev will give you a well-formatted transcript. For 25 cents a minute (a little lower for large volumes), Trint will give you a transcript riddled with errors, but will help you correct it with a sophisticated editing tool.

And for 10 cents a minute, the brand-new CheapTranscription.io will give you a no-frills text doc with even more errors. Depending on your needs, you might want to use all three. Here’s how to choose.

I have 470 podcast episodes in my queue right now, after some paring down. There’s just too much good stuff to listen to: fiction, chat shows, history lessons, interviews, reported documentaries, weird semi-fiction. Of the hundreds of podcast episodes I listened to this year, these are the 15 that taught or entertained me the most.

Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman has covered some of the world's biggest news stories for ABC, CBS, and BBC, including the Arab Spring, the Libyan Revolution, the invasion of Iraq, the trapped Chilean miners, and the international war on the drug trade.

Now he runs the company behind Trint, an A.I.-based automated transcription service that saves reporters, and many other workers, from hours of tedious work. He told us all about entering the business world, and learning how it works.

Douglas McGray's first magazine doesn't look like a magazine. Pop-Up Magazine, currently on tour, is a live variety show that uses different techniques to tell a story onstage. McGray also runs the California Sunday Magazine (which does look like a magazine), a weekly magazine about California, the American West, Asia and Latin America. We talked to him how he organises a live show, his philosophy on cross-disciplinary collaboration, and his favourite shortcut - a literal one.

Heather Dietrick used to run this place. Dietrick was the beloved president of Lifehacker US' parent company, Gizmodo Media Group, before leaving in 2017 to join The Daily Beast as CEO. In How I Work's tradition of interviewing our past and present colleagues, we talked to her about building a career in law and business defined by the US First Amendment.

This week on The Upgrade, we spoke in front of a live audience at On Air Fest with journalist Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times, and the co-author of Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. Jill is currently a political columnist for The Guardian as well as a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Harvard. Her next book, News Wars, will be out in 2019.

Journalists, and bloggers who pose as journalists, get a lot of pitches over email. I get about 20 a day, so I'm pretty heavy on the archive button. But if you're trying to pitch something you've worked on, and you aren't a professional publicist, you're actually at an advantage. Last month, game developer Andrew Miller asked me for advice on how to pitch his work for coverage. Here's what I told him.

Australia is a world leader in passing the most amendments to existing and new anti-terror and security laws in the liberal democratic world. Since September 11, 2001, it has passed 54 laws. The latest suggested addition is the Turnbull government’s crackdown on foreign interference - and it has dangerous implications for press freedoms in our country.

Now that everyone has a blog and two podcasts, you don't have to be a rarified expert to field questions from a journalist, or to appear as a guest on a show. Talking to the media can be exciting but terrifying. What if they misquote you? What if they secretly want to do a hit piece on you? What if you're so boring that they cancel the show forever?