In a private group the question was posed. And it ended with “if you want to advocate for this profession, whether as a reporter, a student, or other, please just focus on getting better every day. Everything else is just noise and not helpful in you becoming the solution.”
I am preserving my answer here because I feel it has value.
“I am writing honestly and hope you will take the time to consider what I write.
Economically getting better is not really going to help our situation. It may, for sure, improve individual reporters’ outcomes, and the outcome of individual proceedings/jobs. So I support improvement. But we are facing a very specific situation where the guy who got the shortage forecasted under NCRA went to STTI to push digital using that shortage forecast, and the large corporations behind STTI, including Veritext and Stenograph, put their time and attention into expanding digital offerings, with Stenograph offering realtime digital certificates at one time. Veritext advertised every day for years to get people into digital reporting and BlueLedge through Ed 2 Go got its training on college websites across the country.
So you have a situation where the largest companies in the business took a hard shift toward digital under the excuse of shortage. As they shift digital and continue to buy agencies providing stenographer jobs, the number of jobs that would’ve went to stenographers goes down, and this causes public sector to have trouble finding people, so public sector starts recording and the number of stenographer jobs drops even further, reducing our combined political strength even more.
You can see this in the way they act. Veritext went from firing that lady and saying stenographers were the lifeblood of the company to telling reporters digital reporters are reporters so they’d better get used to it and they have 3,000 digital applications a month. True? Unsure. But think about what they’re signaling.
With our reduced power, companies have more power to set rates. “Take what we offer or we’ll give your job to someone else.”
So you have a situation where you can be as good as you want to be. As they economically outplay us and our numbers go down, we will slowly lose our ability to choose our own destiny so to speak. We will be many people fighting for the shrinking number of jobs not going digital. Today it does not matter to you because you are good at your job and feel secure. By the time your job is on the line, there will probably be too few of us to make a difference.
Perhaps think of the field as a pyramid with the realtime jobs at the top. What happens when the bottom of the pyramid disappears? The top of the pyramid ends up on the floor. And that’s assuming it doesn’t shatter when it hits the floor.
If we do not improve our collective understanding of the wider market and what is happening right now, and what has unfolded over the last 13 years, we risk the next 10 or 20 being a very rough ride for those of us that hopefully still have jobs.
We’re basically asking people to shut their eyes to all this and close the gap between 95% and 100% while they get systematically replaced by people that never did this a day in their lives.”
Reader, your eyes are clearly open.
Do you see what I see?
P.S.
I agree 100 percent. For years those who regularly provide RT assumed they were bullet-proof because the technology wasn’t good enough to replace them. Every day that becomes less and less true, unfortunately. And before anybody makes the assumption that I say this out of a stance of sour grapes because I can’t provide RT, I did so for years as a CART provider. The wolf has been at the door for a decade and is currently in the process of clawing it open. ALL stenos need to work together to stop it.
In the Nineteenth Century, when skilled technical workers who cared deeply about the textiles they produced using complex machines railed against a new kind of machine that produced manifestly lower quality fabric in much higher volumes using child labor from the orphanages, merely focusing on getting better every day did not help them. To borrow some words from Cory Doctorow, “there is a long tradition of capitalist innovation, in which new production efficiencies are used to increase quantity at the expense of quality.”
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/11/modal-dialog-a-palooza/#autoplay-videos
Love to see it.