This app ate the draft I made about r/court_reporting! Technology is crazy.
r/court_reporting now joins r/courtreporting and r/stenography as places where machine shorthand writers can be chronically online talk to each other anonymously through Reddit. Made by a not-me court reporter, for court reporters, it’s worth joining the discussion today!
In other news, we already have a couple of pledges and a couple hundred eyes on the post about New York City unionization from yesterday. Word about the idea has been posted to the Industry Times of New York.
I gotta say though, alternative publications like mine thrive off word-of-mouth spread from readers like you. If anyone out there would like to share the Industry Times press release or my post from yesterday, I’d be eternally grateful, even if you share it under the guise of an insult about me so that the agencies don’t catch on. I had the privilege of very briefly speaking with two figureheads from the then-defunct Federation of Shorthand over the years. I got the sense that one of the reasons it didn’t work out was it was hard to reach people. It’s still hard to reach people. But now the internet is so ubiquitous that word can travel faster and farther than was imaginable in the whole history of mankind. Surely, if we can get some shares, we can reach more people than those reporters of the past were able to.
And, you know, like I said yesterday, once this gets rolling it becomes a model that is theoretically reproducible in other states. I’ve already had a reporter reach out about the terrible treatment they’ve received in another state, the pain of doing the “freelance” thing with disabilities, and the hope that the unionization model will take off and protect new reporters.
For anyone that’s doing great in this field, I know you don’t want to let negativity into your bubble. I was the same way. But the purpose of acknowledging these negative situations is to progress toward positive solutions.
Let me remind everybody that the paragons of silence and ignorance that instinctively cling to their failing traditions are the ones that brought us to a place where we have very little institutional support, a falling median wage, and the public perception that this profession cannot meet the demands of a modern world. Yet we persist, insistent on assisting each other through a time of rapid change and artificial upheaval of our previously unchallenged prevalence. We must listen to the stories of struggle, lest we see a cascading failure and consequent erasure of our principles and paradigm.
Now say that 5x fast.