I had an exchange the other day where someone asked whether Veritext was advertising digital, and it caught me by surprise. I’ve been pretty active on social media and this site sharing my stuff. Did I fail to publish about this? Can’t remember. So here it is.
As best I can tell, Veritext has been publishing about digital pretty much every day for about a year. Thanks to my algorithm, I see their ads often. At one point in December of last year I started to write down when I saw digital and when I saw steno to try to check my confirmation bias and see if what I believed was true — I believed the digital ads were coming up more.
I recorded somewhere around 1 steno ad for every 10 digital ads. I discontinued recording what I saw after that, but I still see digital ads frequently, albeit less so.
Now, this result is not 100% reliable. There are many, many, factors that can impact this.
But the ultimate thing I want to get across in sharing these is that yes, for anyone that missed it, companies are advertising for digital. And I want people to think about how companies were telling people “there’s nothing they can do.” And I want people to think about how at least two of those companies had reps in the Speech-to-Text Institute, an organization that fraudulently stated the stenographer shortage was impossible to solve and distributed materials meant to manipulate our market and mislead consumers, court administrators, court reporters, students, and the public. So while companies were busy telling all of you there was nothing they could do, they were actually doing quite a lot, it was just working against you, court reporters, so they couldn’t tell you out loud. But that’s okay. “It’s just business,” they say, as they do everything in their power to create a market glut of reporters and push your incomes lower.
Well, it’s just business. And my business is information. If you like that? Donate on the front page of Stenonymous.com. It’s one of those weird jackpot type situations where either I get a little money to supplement my media activities or I get super lucky and retire into doing this advocacy stuff. If you don’t like that, the blog is on sale for $6 million. You can tear the whole thing down and destroy half a decade of my work for cheap. Serious inquiries only.
Ad log from Veritext with a U.S. Legal Support Ad on the bottom.
