I once wrote an article for CFO magazine about Herman Miller, Inc., which required interviews with CFO Brian Walker and his top people. At the time, 1998, I didn’t record my interviews. I figured it was too much of a hassle, too much work to listen to the recordings, too much of a risk that by recording I would dampen my subjects’ candor.

But that was a mistake. Little did I know that, ten years later, I would write a book about Herman Miller, Inc.—and I would thirst for the full text and texture of those decade-old conversations. Yes, I still had notes, buried in boxes in my basement. But I couldn’t pull from them the detail I wanted—and certainly not the quotes—and now I wanted every twist and turn of the conversation.

I mention this because it demonstrates just one reason why I’m now a big advocate of recording interviews: You never know what you’ll need later. Even a day or two after an interview, you often realize that what you emphasized in your notes is not what you want to emphasize in your writing.  With a recording, you can go back and retrieve the lost threads.

This seems obvious, but a debate rages among journalists about whether to bother with a recorder. Are recordings a help or a hindrance?

To be sure, recorders can hinder a relaxed, free-flowing conversation. In fact, they can ruin an interview, especially about sensitive topics, because sources clam up or deflect tough questions. Recordings also require you to take time—often time you scarcely have—to transcribe. Pulling the most valuable nuggets from a long transcription is also hard. So there is a case to be made that recorder-free interviews are a better option, above all for quick-turnaround articles.

But with digital recorders today, the advantages of recording vastly outweigh the disadvantages. For a book, unlike an article, the interviews you rely on are often months old. A recording—just the sound of someone’s voice—restores the tone, music, and “body” language of the conversation. Recordings put you right back in the moment.

Other advantages of recorders are legion: You can listen to your source better and ask better questions, because you’re not simultaneously using your bandwidth to condense the conversation into notes. And you’re a much better conversationalist and probably ask better follow-up questions.

If you do record, how do you make the best of it? Put the recorder as close as possible to your source. Explain the ground rules of how you will use the recording—to put people at ease. Do use a notebook to a least jot down the time stamp (minutes/seconds) when juicy stuff comes up. You can then zero in later to listen to just the good parts of your conversation.

The most useful aspect of digital recordings is that, just before you write a part of your manuscript, you can listen to key interview snippets. The recorder restores your grasp of the material. You’re right back in the moment, able to reflect that freshness in your writing.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published April 1, 2010]