# From a recording to an article

What you hold when you walk away: an audio file, and four facts you said out loud into it. This is
what happens next, and where the language changes.

## 1 · Transcribe it verbatim, the same day

Whisper, ChatGPT, whatever — but **verbatim**, in the language it was spoken, with `[inaudible]`
where the hall won. A cleaned-up transcript is already an edit, and you cannot un-edit it later.

Save it at `redacao/entrevistas/<date>-<company-slug>.md` with a header carrying the four spoken
facts: name, role, company, and the one-line answer to question 1. **That file is the source.**
Everything downstream cites it the way an article cites a frozen page.

## 2 · Split it into two piles, and never merge them

This is the whole discipline of this newsroom applied to a conversation:

- **What they said about themselves** — what they build, who pays, what is hard, what they are
  here for. This is a **primary source**, and it is quotable as *"X said"*, attributed, today.
- **What they said about the world** — market sizes, who is biggest, what the government did, what
  another company is doing. These are **leads to verify**, exactly like a line in a ChatGPT
  delivery. They get an issue and a source hunt, and **none of them is publishable as fact because
  a founder said it into a microphone.**

A number said confidently at a summit is still a number with no source behind it.

## 3 · The language split, which is new here

**You record in English. The site publishes in European Portuguese.** So:

- The **transcript stays in the language it was spoken.** It is evidence, and evidence is never
  translated — the same rule that keeps a frozen page's bytes untouched.
- The **article is written in European Portuguese**, by this newsroom.
- A **quotation** is the hard case. A quote translated is no longer verbatim, and this publication's
  whole claim is that what is between quotation marks is what was said. So: a translated quote
  carries the original beside it, or it is not a quote — it is a summary in our words, unquoted.
  The article says which language the interview was in, in its own provenance block.
- **The person approves the Portuguese** before it goes out, not just the English. They are being
  quoted in a language they may not have chosen; that is their decision to check, not ours to make.

This is the first content on this site that is born in one language and published in another, and
it is worth saying plainly: **the translation is an editorial act, and it is recorded as one.**

## 4 · Where it lands

In **`empresas`** — the brief's own section for companies, which is what a startup is. There is no
ninth section for this: `CLAUDE.md` fixes the eight, and a series is a shape inside a section, not a
section of its own. The series is what makes them findable together.

Each interview becomes an article in the ordinary way — a dated folder, prose with source marks, a
verification record, a provenance file — with one addition: `origem: entrevista` and the transcript
named as what it rests on.

## 5 · What the four spine questions are for

Twenty interviews with the same four questions is a **dataset**, and it supports pieces no single
interview can:

- what twenty founders can do now that they could not eighteen months ago
- whether the hard part is technology, money or people — and how that splits
- where they disagree with the consensus, and whether they disagree with the same thing
- who they said to talk to, and who got named more than once

That last one draws a map of the room from the inside. **It is the strongest thing in this pack and
it comes from the closing question**, which is the one easiest to skip when you are tired and it is
four in the afternoon.

## 6 · Who does what

| Step | Who |
|---|---|
| Record, and get the four facts on tape | You, in the hall |
| Transcribe verbatim, same day | You, or an agent you hand the audio to |
| Split into "about themselves" / "about the world" | An agent, and it shows its working |
| Open issues for every world-claim | An agent |
| Write the Portuguese article | Redação |
| Check every quote against the transcript | Verificação |
| Send the Portuguese to the interviewee | You |
| `estado: publicado` | You, and only you |