After comparing the net assets of several key associations, it raised my curiosity as to when they all hit the internet. Such a thing is not dispositive of the meritoriousness of any given argument or the validity of an organization, but since this is a blog, I have the luxury of doing some things “for fun.”
Using GoDaddy’s WHOIS lookup, I got to see the date that each domain was created.
May 1996, National Court Reporters Association. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the National Court Reporters Association was the first to hit the web. In my view, its power position in the field should be afforded much more weight than it is by journalists that cover our field. In fact, one of my only criticisms of NCRA is that it has a culture of organizational inertia and is obsessed with the status quo despite the evidence that there’s a whole corporate cabal threatening the livelihoods of its membership.
June 1997, American Association of Electronic Reporters and Transcribers. In my view, one of the most stunning indictments against STTI’s credibility and digital court reporting as a whole is that it had to rebrand itself to make any progress. Steve Townsend was one of the people that got AAERT rolling. Any coincidence he’s president of STTI today? And what’s STTI’s purpose? Convincing the public stenographers are no longer necessary and/or cannot meet demand of the legal field.
January 1998, National Verbatim Reporters Association. The last of the well-known organizations to hit the internet in the 90s. I have not much to say about NVRA. It’s worth noting that realtime voice writing is still better than digital court reporting based on available data, so there’s big room for growth.
In 2019, the Global Alliance of Speech-to-Text captioning came online. I mostly leave this organization alone, though I did try to share my thoughts on the Testifying While Black study with someone from it once as to why stenographers are probably the best bet.
In 2019, the Speech-to-Text Institute hit the web. This is the organization I’ve said has acted fraudulently in its information dispersal regarding the stenographer shortage in America.
With this little bit of internet history preserved, I’ll be drafting my next big post™️.