Crooked Media and Adobe Partner to Make Podcasts More Accessible

Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced a partnership with Crooked Media, the progressive independent media company that delivers bold content to entertain, inform and inspire action, to make podcasts more accessible, leveraging Adobe Premiere Pro’s Speech to Text technology to caption popular content.

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 Adobe and Crooked Media to work together. This partnership is now 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 Itand X-Ray Vision.

“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.”

“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.”

As a media company that publishes news analysis and timely commentary, efficiency and accuracy are extremely important for the Crooked Media production team, who aim for just three 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.

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.

You can learn more about the partnership at the YouTube video here.

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Crooked believes that we need a better conversation about politics, culture and the world around us – one that doesn’t just focus on what’s broken, but what we can do to fix it. At a time when it’s increasingly easy to feel cynical or hopeless, former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor have created a place where people can have honest conversations and tell stories that inform, entertain and inspire action. In 2017 they started Crooked with Pod Save America – a no-bullshit conversation about politics. Since then, they’ve continued to add new shows, voices and opportunities for activism through our Vote Save America platform, because it’s up to each of us to do our part to engage in our democracy and build a better world.

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