A news story prominent in Victoria today highlights the use, importance and in some cases danger of a digital voice recorder and potentially the audio that it can contain. To summarise the story it is alleged that senior members of the Australian Labor Party stole The Age’s political editor Farrah Tomazin’s digital voice recorder which contained a recording of a private conversation between Farrah and the former Victorian Liberal premier Ted Baillieu. You can draw your own conclusions as to why this recording was of alleged interest to the ALP. But from our point of view, we are just pleased to see a digital voice recorder deservedly receive its 15 minutes of fame, after all these small devices are key to helping many a news story or article and without their reliability and fantastic audio recording quality journalists would need either a great memory or need to resurrect the art of shorthand.
Picture credit: Jessica Gardner on Instagram and Twitter @JessiGardner
For the record, Labor state secretary Noah Carroll said “The Victorian ALP categorically rejects any suggestion that it was involved in the theft of any dictaphone or the distribution of the contents of any dictaphone”. We are just relieved that the digital voice recorder is back with its rightful owner. We tweeted Miss Tomazin to get clarification on the make and model of the device but are yet to receive a reply.
The digital voice recorder was eventually recovered as is seen in the image above being filmed by the various networks.
Quotes from this article referenced from his ABC news article: Victorian ALP denies involvement in theft of reporter’s dictaphone containing Baillieu interview
You may also like this article, just to get the versatility of digital voice recorders: 18 Alternate Uses For Digital Voice Recorders