In the framework of ESTER, the recent French broadcast radio news transcription task evaluation, we have developed the first version of ANTS, the Automatic News Transcription System of LORIA. This paper describes the different components of the ANTS system and provides some first recognition results on the ESTER database. Then it presents several experiments carried out on this system to take into account the specificities of the French language: how accurate should the phones models be and how to deal with the problem of the liaisons between words.