Crooked Media and Adobe partner to make podcasts more accessible
At a time when video and podcasting are both skyrocketing in popularity, the ability to turn around entertaining, digestible and accessible content on increasingly tight timelines is crucial to the success of any media company. When Crooked Media, a longtime user of Adobe Creative Cloud, committed to making its award-winning content accessible to wider audiences through captioning, it was a natural fit for our two companies to work together.
Today our partnership becomes a reality as Adobe’s industry-leading Speech to Text feature set in Premiere Pro is being used across Crooked Media’s video platforms to caption popular content including interviews and clips from Pod Save America, the popular political podcast hosted by Crooked founders and former Obama staffers and speechwriters Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, as well as Lovett or Leave It, Offline, Pod Save the World, Keep It, and X-Ray Vision.
As a media company that publishes news analysis and timely commentary, efficiency and accuracy is extremely important for the Crooked Media production team, who aim for just 3 hours between the moment the producer hits “stop recording” to when the podcast episode is live. However, turning around high-quality captions in a quick time frame can be challenging. Video creators and editors often have to make their captions manually after waiting for the transcription to be created — which can take longer than 24 hours — or switch between different tools for various tasks, limiting the use of captions across video content.
Speech to Text in Premiere Pro leverages AI and machine learning to automate the creation of transcriptions and captions, speeding up the tedious and time-consuming process so that the Crooked Media team can get high-quality, precise captions for their video podcasts and social media channels fast, making their content more engaging and accessible without missing a beat.
“When Crooked Media debuted in 2016, we were purely a podcast company, but we quickly learned that video was going to play an important role in helping us reach new audiences and make our content accessible to more people,” said Matt DeGroot, senior director of video production at Crooked Media. “However, the tools in the market didn’t offer the speed and accuracy that we needed for our quick production turnaround times. Speech to Text in Premiere Pro allows us to put high-quality captions on all our video content, opening the door for more people to participate in the podcast experience.”
Known for multiple hit shows across the spectrum of politics, culture, sports, scripted limited series, and more, Crooked Media’s content informs, entertains, and inspires audiences — generating more than 21 million monthly downloads and a Peabody Award nomination in 2022. With video platforms like YouTube becoming top destinations for podcast listeners, creating accessible content through captioning is more important than ever, not only for audience engagement, but to ensure that people who have different abilities have access to and can engage with the same content everyone else has.
“Making amazing podcasts is Crooked Media’s bread and butter, and we’re big admirers of their work,” said Meagan Keane, principal product marketing manager at Adobe. “It’s so exciting for us to see Speech to Text in Premiere Pro being used by a company that produces some of the most informational and entertaining podcast content available today, and we are proud to know that it’s helping to make their shows more accessible so that more people can partake in the experience.”
The podcasting industry has matured and expanded into one of the world’s biggest platforms for people to tell stories, share news, and connect authentically with their audiences. Adobe is committed to innovating alongside the growing industry by introducing tools like Speech to Text in Premiere Pro, Project Shasta for AI powered editing and recording to make audio sound like it was recorded in a studio, and Adobe Express for free podcast cover templates and art.