The Empty City Strategy

Everywhere you look there’s an article about digital reporting. It’s the future! It’s coming! Abandon all hope ye who use steno! We’ve even had articles claim AI is 95 percent accurate or more.

You know what’s missing? Evidence of these claims. Everything is behind a pay wall, a service, a guarantee, a private company. We need to acknowledge that in this country, companies are generally allowed to lie. Anything short of serious fraud is probably not getting investigated. Anything short of serious damage is probably not being sued for.

Anyone can make a claim. Over 400 people read this blog in the last eight days. You have no evidence what we’re telling you is true. You either believe us or leave it. There’s no penalty for us if we’re lying. Decide for yourself while we get into the Empty City Strategy.

The idea is simple enough. When facing an overwhelming force, throw open the gates of the city, sit up in a tower like Zhuge Liang, and start playing your lute. Your enemies, so convinced that there’s a trap waiting for them, flee or fall back. The concept is one of deception and demoralization, and it’s something you see in business and politics.

If a potential opponent is demoralized, they will not fight you. How many people do not start a business because there’s already a huge company in that field that they feel they cannot compete with? If we say to you right now that we have a great idea — let’s begin a business selling burgers and fries — you’d laugh. Right? No! We cannot do that! There are too many big players in the field! McDonald’s would crush us, they’ve been around since 1955. Look at Shake Shack. Born 49 years later, and yet still managed to carve out some of the market for itself.

Nobody knows what the future holds. Giant companies go bankrupt all the time. Bear Stearns, survivor of the Great Depression, a company that had some $9 billion in revenue and 13,000+ employees worldwide, died thanks to the Great Recession. The case we are trying to make here is simple: Don’t be scared of the empty city. If someone is shouting out about how something is the next big thing and how everybody should jump aboard or be left behind, consider their motives, fears, and evidence.

We can go on and on about how ATMs replaced bank tellers, self-service kiosks replaced cashiers, cars replaced horses — or we can realize that this industry is just a little different. Many of us are reliant on these companies to bring us work, but we are not their employees. We are not disposable.

We have the option and opportunity to compete with them directly. It’s as simple as telling the law office secretary you take depos independently. The major startup costs for producing work, steno machine, CAT software, laptop, and printer are largely borne by us anyway. It’s not like your CVS where the employee has no hope of buying a storefront, or your teller that can’t afford to open a bank, or your horse that — well, you get the idea. We pay out the cost of doing business at the very start of our careers. Isn’t that worth thinking about?

So if you’re a stenographer and you’re on the fence about this field because people around you are telling you the future is bleak or uncertain, you can be certain that’s only one perspective. That’s one side of the story. For a field that’s been “dying” for the last fifty years, there’s a whole lot of businesses out there trying to get a bigger slice of the pie and have you forfeit your own. And if you want the unbridled truth, you’ll have to stop taking people’s word for it.

Shortage Solutions 4: Direct Market Apps

So by now everybody knows the Uber story. Basically replaced or pushed on the conventional taxi company and made it so that you no longer had to call a company or hail a cab, but could just click in on your phone and get door-to-door service.

Expedite is kind of like that for legal service professionals, AKA stenographers. Court Buddy is kind of like that for lawyers. With more industries trying the direct market app approach, from food delivery to barbers, we are seeing people really give the direct market apps a try and it might be worth looking into as a potential shortage solution. Like other direct market apps, there’s bound to be competition and a growing number of apps to fill that void.

A word of caution: These direct market apps are only good for us if the players know their own market. Be a part of that. If you don’t know your market, join a mentoring program. If you know your market, be a mentor, guide the others in your market so that they can take advantage of these new ideas. Look at Uber. There have literally been articles about how Uber tries to use “psychological carrots” to get drivers to drive cheap. We don’t need to drive cheap to get work. If you start to notice these apps playing the carrot game with you, don’t be afraid to beat them with a stick!

Second word of caution: Agencies are reportedly telling their reporters not to use Expedite and even allegedly withholding work from those that do. Know why? Their entire business model relies on being the middleman, and apps like Expedite can subsume the middleman position and can threaten their livelihood.

Apps like Expedite also can dispel the illusion of a shortage in areas where the ongoing reporter shortage may be less severe than companies would like clients and reporters to believe. As reporters, we need to identify that the shortage may be exaggerated in part so that companies can say “there’s nothing we can do but go digital” and recreate the glut of reporters that they used as an excuse to depress our rates nine years ago in New York.

The 2013 Ducker Report forecasted a shortage, and we’re all coming up with ideas and solutions every day. Coincidentally none of them do away with the stenographic reporter. Remember: The future is malleable. You do not need to throw away a vibrant and wonderful career on the say-so of somebody who’d profit from you getting out of the business.

Shortage Solutions 1: Remote Proceedings

One of the reasons given for stenographer shortage is that many reporters have a strict coverage area, and type or amount of work they will cover. Nothing inherently wrong with that. People have standards. Esquire put out a Georgia article about remote deposition proceedings. Photo archive. We’ll note that in the original article it says 70 percent of stenographers to retire by 2023, but the Ducker Report seems to suggest 2033. The basic idea is to increase the coverage area and reduce commute time by using video or audio to have the stenographer attend. We first came across that idea in SoCalReporters’s blog post, There Is No Evil Empire and mirrored it in There Is No Rebel Alliance.

Though we haven’t jumped into every state’s laws, we did spend quite a good amount of energy and time on learning our own state’s laws, and we think it would be feasible in New York. Remote swearing is allowed under the circumstances described in the CPLR. If you have a choice between agencies using digitals or patching us in remotely to these things, we hope you’re smart enough to choose being patched in. We hope agencies are smart enough to keep choosing stenographers first and coming up with creative solutions for complex problems. We hope that stenographers continue to recognize when they’re not being chosen first and go out to build bigger, better business.

We reached out to Esquire about this initiative and article, and for a brief interview with Avi Stadler, Esquire’s General Counsel, about the program.

Might be worth talking with your own agencies about these ideas. If you have or are building your own company or book of business, the investment in remote capability might be something to look at. They want stenographers. We want them to use stenographers. And the consumer pressure in many cases is for there to be a stenographer. All that’s left is for stenographers to get themselves in the mix and make sure we adapt to the market if this is how steno sells. Some important tips from an ex-freelancer:

Get immediate contact information from other attendees in case you’re cut off or lose contact. You need to be able to call the others and let them know you’re no longer there taking the record.
Learn how to hotspot your cellphone in the event of a site service disruption OR have some kind of backup plan or call service for technology failure. Adaptability can seize the day.
Unexpected things will happen. Let’s say an entire unrelated party gets linked into yours by mistake? Take charge. Be a leader. Explain to the other conference that they should call into the agency. Try to communicate with the agency that there’s an issue. Have emergency numbers or contacts saved directly into your phone so that internet errors don’t stop you from communicating vital information to clients and agencies.

We are thankful that there are so many entities and independents brainstorming and coming up with ideas for the field. We encourage working reporters to join the discussion. Make your concerns known. Have your ideas be heard. We understand that this isn’t the newest idea out there, and that various companies have promoted virtual depositions, even as far back as 2017. Archive. But the best we can do is acknowledge that work and ask for more promotion of stenographic services coast to coast. Hopefully in a year or two we’re eating our words on previous articles that told stenographers certain agencies were not their friends and watching the steno renaissance continue full swing.

For now, consider this one potential shortage solution in what may end up a series of many dependent upon reader feedback.

NYSCRA Bagels and Lox February 2019

Some will have seen an article authored after a little prodding and editing (AKA help!) from another reporter, Devora Hackner. Photo archive here. Obviously, I had overall positive impressions from the entire event. Got to meet Steno Joe in person! The food was absolutely amazing. There were literally three or four tables of food and everything from bagels to sushi. NYSCRA spared no expense and its sponsors did an amazing job. If you were a non-steno there to learn about steno, you walked away sated and happy. I do think it was an important showcase of our field, and there were over 100 seats, most full.

Unfortunately the structure of the event prohibited me from seeing the CaseCAT and Eclipse trainings, but I know both trainers are at the top of their game and I have personally attended Anthony Frisolone’s past webinars and a Local 1070 seminar, and it’s always been a wonderful experience. If you need CaseCAT help, Anthony is the man. His training is worth every dime. Quick note, the photography by Shmuel Amit was also amazing and is featured mostly along the bottom of the original article.

There are two major points that don’t get covered in the article because Stenonymous and that article have different audiences. Firstly, when Jane Sackheim got up to speak, it was an honest surprise. Hadn’t been on the agenda. It’s rumored Diamond put 1,500 or more down on the event though, so there’s no real issue with letting a sponsor like that get a few words in. If I had a sponsor that good, we’d be sponsoring stenographers to visit NYC high schools. Jane did say there would always be a need for court reporters. Given the current climate, I hope she meant stenographic court reporters, but given that she was funding a NYSCRA event along with ASSCR, we’ll assume it was stenographic court reporters! Then there was a talk about balance.

Jane said it was always a balance between paying what a reporter would accept and charging what a client would pay. That is an insightful thing to think about and consider. Not every single proceeding is worth $400 per page, and there is a certain point where clients just wouldn’t pay. That said, I have always been under the belief that we are incredibly underpaid in New York. When I was freelancing, many of my contemporaries and I were making in the ballpark of $3.25 per page and 0 to 50 cents on a copy. Back at that time (~2012) I met some freelancers out from Ohio who reported they made a dollar or two a page on copies. Different markets? Yes. Different jobs? How different can they possibly be? We had a hard time negotiating here in New York. We were told there were too many reporters and not enough work because that was a convenient thing to say to get us to accept low rates. Now there’s a reporter shortage but we shouldn’t ask for more because clients won’t pay it? All the respect in the world for a woman that built a business and ran it so well that Veritext decided to buy it out rather than compete with it. There’s power to the personality that runs the ship. But here is something I think every reporter should consider: We don’t know the truth until invoices start leaking. We don’t know if the copies are being charged at a buck a page or 4.85 a page. We have to question it for ourselves and decide how to build our own brands and reputations. We don’t know and therefore we can’t say with certainty today what the truth is, but it’s probably somewhere between clients won’t pay and reporters expect too much. We know there’s a serious profit margin in the business because almost every reporting firm has a main office and a satellite office in every borough of the city, and I would point to that each and every time someone says the agencies are hurting. Do business with these agencies, and do good work, but be open to the idea that sometimes you are told things that are subjective are objectively true. We did over 900 math calculations, and to not be working all the time, you either have to be a fast transcriber or making in the ballpark of $5.50 a page average. That’s a tall order, but I believe that if agencies and reporters continue to put down money and ideas to enhance the field and our professional organizations, we’ll be okay.

Without further delay let’s end this on a high note. Nonmembers who attended get $18 off their membership this year. Also, NYSCRA did something incredible. They asked for the following:

Seminar speakers you’d like to see.

CEU-approvable

Seminars or speeches you yourself would be willing to conduct.

So what’s left to do? Write NYSCRA today at nyscra@bowermanagementservices.com or head over to their site at NYSCRA, tell Tim he’s doing a GREAT job, and share your thoughts and ideas. They’re asking for them! Personally I’d love a few seminars for freelancers on how to be marketable to agencies and how to be marketable to attorneys directly. Hopefully in the coming weeks we’ll have an interview with Eve Barrett of the Expedite app to discuss exactly that. I think these things are perfectly attainable, but it’s time for members and potential members to ask for them.

MA Payonk: Steno First.

Mary Ann Payonk is an exceptional person. She has been hosting yearly reporter empowerment conferences. She had sponsored me to go to an Anita Paul seminar when I was much younger and when Anita was still with us. In turn, I can say I’ve sponsored students and student contests to try to encourage people to be the best they can be. I’ve spent nearly my entire working career helping people either publicly or in PMs. I attribute at least some of that good nature to the fact that I was treated exceptionally well as a newbie reporter by her and other elites. We’re all in this together.

Some will have seen the occasional disagreement I’ve had with Mary Ann on technology and new people entering the field. While those disagreements stand on their merit or in their moment, there is a great deal that Mary Ann and I agree on.

Best I can tell, she’s the verbarian that coined the phrase real realtime, and that described what I saw as a very unfortunate movement where people who were not really ready to be realtimers were stating they were realtime so that they could make some money. Of course, this has the adverse effect of increasing the supply of realtime writers, and decreasing the price that realtime writers can command. If I get 20 percent of what someone is saying, she gets 200 percent, so seriously, people like me should not offer realtime in a service or freelance setting. We need to make sure realtime is a premium service and that when lawyers pay for it, they get what they pay for.

She’s been a true ally in that she has, like me, advocated for the working reporter to go out and get clients. She wants people to be resourceful. Even more than that, she wants companies to put steno first. There’s just a wealth of knowledge there that needs to be tapped and paid attention to by anyone who hasn’t gotten to meet MA personally, but particularly new reporters. She’s got class, sass, and fingers too fast for me. If you’re somebody who’s new to this field, you want to talk to her, you want to get some perspective. As a matter of fact, you want as many perspectives as possible because it will help you make informed decisions.

One of the big takeaways from the blog post linked above was the meme. If you think hiring a professional is expensive, just wait until you hire an amateur. Don’t be an amateur. Keep building the skills you need to be successful. Keep marketing yourself as the premier choice in speech-to-text. And realize that there are very simple skills that can automatically make you more marketable. There are reporters out there who have bad time management. I’m guilty. It hurts our marketability when deadlines are slipped. It hurts our marketability when our coverage radius is only a mile or two. It hurts our marketability when our coverage days are only the third Wednesday of an odd month. Yes, you can go out there right now and build a national business: But you can also do simple things that me, and Mary Ann, and half the steno world can’t say enough: Be reliable. Know your worth. Network. Learn your market.

There Is No Rebel Alliance

We’ve got a natural leader on the field. There are a lot of leadership styles, but two very prominent ones are those who want to lead, my way or the highway, and those who do not want to lead but know that speaking out is the right thing to do. We think we’ve got the latter! We came across a California blog, SoCalReporters, that does pretty much what we do and brings forward important issues related to steno. And we’d go so far as to say the author(s) behind SoCalReporters are needed natural leaders! The post zeroes in on Veritext, but we all know they’re not the only ones. Sounds like a Sam Smith song.

In the blog post There Is No Evil Empire, the author explores how many Veritext-owned companies there are. The post goes on to say: Have you worked with those companies? That’s okay — we have too! And this is a fine example of what we often try to impress upon people, it doesn’t matter where you work, but the deal you make for yourself and the impressions you give potential clients matter a lot. The post moves into suggestions for what to do with regard to the shortage. Notably:

Stop destroying each other over where we work and start building each other up.
Talk to each other about the issues.
Create alternatives. The writer notes video depos and remote steno appearances in California may not be legally possible for the reporter. In New York, they are possible under specific circumstances. If I could’ve taken depos via video from a satellite office in Brooklyn or Staten instead of White Plains or Long Island, I would’ve saved dozens of hours of my life from the commute. These are possibilities worth exploring.
Picking up clients. The blogger eloquently sets forth that it might be time to reconsider how we market ourselves and that this is a great time to market ourselves. Make people feel good, and the money’ll be rolling in.

Believe it or not, No Evil Empire is very much the kind of thing we need a this point. Whether or not you believe these big box companies to be the Evil Empire or not, you have to admit that the salient theme of working together to propose solutions is paramount.

We are proud each and every time a reporter breaks the silence and seeks to introduce their ideas. It happens on Facebook. It happens on blogs. It happens through associations and submissions to the JCR. It’s happening all over the place. And it happened on February 9, 2019. All that is left is for us to organize these efforts and ideas into a coherent strategy. And let’s face it, whether or not you believe there is a rebel alliance, you surely see the merits of working together to solve perceived problems in the field.

Keep writing, keep leading, keep reading, keep learning.

Associations and Why You Matter

The other day on Facebook I came across some rather honest remarks about the upcoming NYSCRA social. They said hey, Diamond Reporting has been depressing our rates for a while, how are we supposed to feel with their names on this event?

Let’s just say we have touched on the fact that sponsors of events do not control the event. The working reporter controls the NYSCRA leadership, and when you sign up as a member you become a part of the decision-making process.

This blog is all about the working reporter. By the time I’m done with it, I’ll have figured out how to organize the dozens of posts a bit better and the 200 or so monthly readers will have an easier time finding information. That said, it’s time to talk less about Stenonymous and more about you.

You matter. I did the math on it. Think of anything you want to legislate in New York. Stenographers in the courts? Bring back the Workers Comp stenographers? Copy protection since courts often rule our transcripts are not copyright protected? This is all done with funding, representation, and grassroots action. Lobbying is expensive and can cost 5,000 to 50,000 a month. In a six-month New York legislative session that might be 30,000 to 300,000 dollars a year. Seems impossible, right? But let’s use some easy numbers. There are 1,300 reporters on the NYSCRA Facebook page. If 500 of those reporters (38 percent) donated 100 bucks a year, which is less than the $165 annual membership, NYSCRA would have a lobbying war chest of 50,000 a year cash. In only two years, NYSCRA would have the cash for a $100,000 lobbying campaign. What could we do with a biannual lobbying campaign of 100k? Even assuming we fail half of all campaigns for ten years, that’s 2 or 3 successful campaigns. Between playing political Powerball and grassroots action, we have a serious shot at making a difference. For a C-note a year and a letter or two when there’s a campaign on, January to June, you’re looking at bolstering your field, securing your job, and protecting all of your fellow stenographers.

And I’m not saying 100 a year is easy to give up. I’ve given up thousands of dollars in membership fees and donations to organizations over the years. I’ve felt the sting of putting down money I didn’t necessarily have. I felt the pain when the Workers Comp campaigns failed. It cost a lot of good people their job and made those that kept the job miserable. I know a lot of you reading felt what I felt. I know a lot of you reading had to do more than feel it. Some of you had to live it. But there are two options: Suffer through the defeats so that we might see victory, or put our heads in the sand and wait for the next big thing to come around and threaten our jobs.

There’s a lot to say for the human factor. Machines don’t vote. Politicians will side with stenographers when they learn how many stenographers they represent. But the bottom line is we have to put together resources to educate them. To do that, you matter.

NCRA and NYSCRA: For Stenographers

It is with a great deal of enjoyment that I share what happened this weekend. NCRA sent out an email blast that it was suspending its corporate partner solicitations. Some of its fabulous directors took to Facebook to share the message as well. I think this is great on a lot of levels. They’re paying attention to our preferred social media space. They’re paying attention to the fact that some of our corporate partners are not being very partnery. They’re reaffirming that they are us.

We all together support the stenographic modality of transcription and record making. NCRA sounds serious about a transformation, and we hope it continues on its current course towards educating the public that this a viable and vibrant career choice and that stenographic reporting is among the best speech-to-text “applications” around. Compared to the NVRA, which doesn’t bother to write back when I ask questions, NCRA’s responsiveness and commitment to its members and potential members is refreshing. I hope that responsiveness continues. I hope that any members that have smart suggestions for changes to the corporate partnership program write in to NCRA today. Out of the many thousands of us, I am sure there are smart and acceptable solutions to be had.

Now I’ll turn to NYSCRA, who also put out a statement reaffirming their commitment to stenography. Let’s face the facts: NYSCRA is an association by stenographers for stenographers. Up until recently, only working stenographers could hold office or vote. We recently held a vote to allow retired stenographers and amazing stenographic educators like Karen Santucci to have officer and voting privileges. The results of such vote were not yet announced, but make no mistake that I was right there voting yes with many of you. NYSCRA is not being coy or dishonest about what they’re saying. They do give entities that donate recognition for donating. Years ago I helped sponsor the breakfast in a Long Island meeting, and my name was right alongside the other sponsors as I recall. I had no control over the breakfast, the event, or anything like that. Sponsors do not control NYSCRA.

Consider this a call for all to get more involved. And don’t believe what you hear. You can get involved in event the smallest of ways. Taking the time to write a suggestion is involvement. Taking the time to attend a meeting is involvement. Even taking some time out to discuss an issue with a colleague and work through the pros, cons, and challenges of an idea can be involvement. Some would have you believe that you must be donating, volunteering, hosting, and traveling to be involved. For those that have the time and energy, we are grateful. But the time things really shine is when a member like you takes up one issue, any issue that you truly believe is important to steno, and makes the associations aware that it can be on their radar. It’s when real members like you step up and propose solutions to the problems we face.

Some look at a question and say: If it was important, someone would’ve answered it already. All I have to ask is: What would make your profession better?

Steno V Digital (Archive Post)

Consider this a gentle touch on an important topic. There’s been a true memetic shift in the way stenographers are interacting and spreading ideas. Content is honestly popping up faster than we can even really digest it, so let this post serve as a staging point for some of what’s happening this Court Reporting and Captioning Week 2019. This weekend I’ve had the pleasure of reading a flyer from the DRA in California (Photo Archive). Read about Idaho’s need for reporters (Photo Archive). Finally, got to see Cleveland Reporting Partners’ whole take on digital v steno (Photo Archive).

In very brief summary we are seeing many people put into writing what I have opined over Facebook. Yes, technology is amazing. But right now it struggles with certain things. It can transcribe one speaker quite well, but if you throw in some stray sounds or a second speaker, it can have a hard time. This makes the market for captioners and legal reporters a little more promising because we have the skill and training to give them what they need now and train others to do it. Make no mistake, there’s a big market in that, so if a company is having you train a digital, make sure you’re getting at least the next ten years of your annual income upfront.

Technological growth is no longer exponential. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive. But until Quantum Computing is cheap and accessible there are probably things we won’t see, like a JARVIS-like AI. We will see imitation AI, that’s for sure, but there is an indeterminate clock on when we will see quantum tech. The running idea and current study that’ll probably lead to true ideas is machine learning. This takes data training sets, like pictures, or recordings, or text — whatever it is programmed to take — and it takes that information and uses it as a basis for its decisions. Sometimes this is entertaining. Sometimes this goes horribly wrong. The bottom line is it is limited by the speed at which it can process its training data and the speed at which it can retrieve that information for later.

I imagine that the training data set for an AI to “do depositions” would look something like recorded depositions paired with their transcripts. There are three big hurdles there, building the training set, processing the training set, and retrieving the right data when it’s time to “do deposition.” In a classic computer we have, in very laypeople terms, little transistors firing on and off to tell the computer what’s going on. Tech is running into a problem where it can’t get these little nanotubes much smaller, and making bigger processors absorbs more electricity. For example, I wrote a Fibonacci-generating program. The basic concept is every number adds itself to the number that would come after it. The computer is happy to make these calculations, but very quickly, the processing power needed to calculate these numbers begins to run dry, and the files we store these numbers in become too large to be opened on a weak laptop. The simplest algorithm in existence busts up a classic computer. This is probably the trouble they have making something that can seamlessly listen to people and transcribe, the computer just doesn’t have the power to process it quickly. Look how long it takes videographers to burn disks or Go To Meeting to process audio. Now imagine adding another layer where the machine is transcribing everything perfectly. In Quantum Computing they’re talking about these very small units being able to calculate everything at once, or large batches of things at once. If they crack that, we’re probably back to exponential technological growth.

In the meantime, fight for your jobs. Fight for market share. It’s not a question of whether we’re outdated. Today the answer to that is no. What matters heavily is perception. Perception can change outcomes. One of the most effective tactics in war has been to get the enemy army to rout, and that’s exactly what digital reporting advocates are trying to get you to do: Give up and go home without a fight. Don’t buy into it, make the technology prove itself. Even the worst stenographer puts in words four or five times faster than the average typist, yet there are still typists.

Keep competing. We are well on our way to winning this thing.

Holding Companies Explanation

One of our readers reached out to me recently with a really interesting and important question. I took some time to answer the question personally but I’d really like to make sure everyone can be on the same page. In my experience, if one person has a question, ten people had the same question and didn’t ask it yet.

The reader asked: How can Diamond sponsor a NYSCRA event when they were bought by Veritext? Great question. Basically I would break it down like this: When you create a corporation, the state grants that corporation, or the corporation’s founder(s), stock or some form of ownership. When a company buys another company, it becomes a holding company or parent corporation. The company being bought is generally referred to as a subsidiary corporation.

So the subsidiary company still exists as its own company and is free to make its own choices as to what to support. The holding company technically has power over it, but doesn’t have to interfere with its day-to-day operations. The two companies both exist, at least until the holding company dissolves legally or the subsidiary company dissolves legally.

Notably, I have read that Veritext itself is owned by a private equity firm. That’s more or less a company that invests in companies and tries to flip them for profit or sell them out on an IPO, taking the stock from private to public ownership, and hopefully for them getting a payday on their investment and exiting.

I do not know if Diamond made the decision to sponsor the event independently or if Veritext gave them permission, but regardless, we’re always happy to see corporations put some time or money into stenography. As harsh as our opinions can be here on Stenonymous, we do acknowledge the value that corporations have and their place in industry. Many of them may yet show themselves to be huge allies, and hopefully every time they do readers will come out and say hey, you need to acknowledge XYZ. At the same time, we will not hold back from calling agencies out when they’re working against stenographers.

Thank you readers! You help me write with every question or correspondence. On that note, if you have information or documentation related to steno news, feel free to write me at ChristopherDay227@gmail.com.

NCRA just made a really awesome announcement, so look out for that article Monday!