Group Marketing Survey 2023

If anybody has a business, nonprofit, or media enterprise to promote in the court reporting, captioning, or stenotype services market, please consider taking the time to fill out about five questions in today’s survey.

The idea is pretty simple. I’m getting better and better at creating or brainstorming ads that drive engagement. With an actual budget for this activity, we could be promoting stenotype services to the general public and lawyers, and we could run ads 24/7 and direct consumers to the businesses that fund the advertising, perhaps via a public list or rating service. We could even perform regional marketing for businesses with a big enough budget. I can also pass my funders tips and tricks on marketing for their own social media pages, particularly as I learn more. I’ll find what works and what flops, and everybody funding the endeavor will benefit from it. If the budget gets really big, perhaps monthly ads could also be taken out in the law publications around the United States.

At this point, I’m still in the research stage of the idea, but my gut instinct to keep this sustainable but inexpensive would be each business paying about $200 a month, With just 8 businesses or sole proprietors in the group, we could run pro-stenographic social media ads year-round, which I guesstimate would generate somewhere in the ballpark of 120,000 engagements. That’s 120,000 chances per year to reach potential customers or audience members. According to at least one market research report, there are at least 3,000 businesses in our field. Just 2% of those businesses paying into it could generate 120,000 engagements a month. That’s steno coming into the feeds of over 1.4 million profiles a year.

I’m willing to change things up a bit, make the front page of Stenonymous.com a tad bit more corporate friendly, and try to attract more eyes to the businesses that sponsor the ads. I tried to raise the alarms on the corporate fraud. It’s not bringing in the funding needed to continue investigating and generating public interest. It’s time to do something different and try to bring more money into your businesses and get more eyes on your hard work. If the funders are serious about this, we could even do away with Stenonymous branding entirely, but I’d need commitments.

I have something of a theory related to our field and human interaction that might shed some light on this idea. I’ve noted that people have an innate need to be heard. How many times have we watched someone speak in court against their lawyer’s advice? Have you ever seen a child or adult with something to say and nobody who’ll listen? They become depressed, frustrated, anxious, angry. We know people need to be heard. What does the market do? It solves needs. Who better to solve the human need to be heard than the captioners, court reporters, and stenographers of the world? Now, stenographers can be very expensive, and there’s no real getting around that because every hour on our machine can mean 1 to 2 hours of transcription. But let’s say we started opening our stenotype service firms up to the public at an hourly rate? Say your page rate is $5.00 and you know you get about 60 pages an hour. You can offer $300/speaking hour stenotype services to the public without losing a dime. The general public could also book reporters on weekends and create additional income.

Economically, I would hope for a few things. 1. The constant barrage of advertisement for the public would educate more people about this field and bring more people into it, ending the shortage decisively. 2. The listing could create a kind of digital marketplace that educates consumers and helps them find the best businesses™️. 3. The barrage of marketing could bring investors onto the field looking to help businesses like yours grow and service more people (more $$$). 4. The funders might be able to network with each other to cover areas hit hardest by shortage, as long as they respect antitrust law, particularly against price fixing. 5. The increase in demand for the gold standard will draw more investors to open schools, which can then use the expected retirees over the next decade to educate the next generation. 6. We could set up a feedback system where businesses could receive or view feedback from consumers, enabling businesses to improve their business and create a more competitive marketplace. 7. The number of funders could grow to the point where we are able to offer group benefits to funders, such as legal referrals, where allowed by law. Many business owners have asked me questions about the law, which I’m happy to talk about but can’t give advice on, because I’m not a lawyer. Imagine a world where you could get that simple legal advice. 8. If the number of funders goes up, there is a very real possibility of locking the price at $200 rather than watching it soar with inflation, meaning fixed-cost advertising in a world with a lot of variables. 9. Diversifying income streams for “court reporting” (bringing in general consumers and getting out of the lawyer niche). 10. Captioners might benefit from more demand if more corporate boards and business owners know CART exists. How can consumers ask for something if they don’t know about it? 11. If wildly successful, scaling up to TV ads, podcasts, or more.

As an aside, we could also pump the market with speaking tips to help make our job easier. Joshua Edwards, creator of StenoMasters, is one of the best regional speakers around. I am quite hopeful that if I presented him with a budget, he’d help us educate the public. So much of the hassle from this job comes from speakers that don’t get what we do. We can make it easy for them.

I am in an interesting position. I’ve spent the last few years learning about this social media advertising stuff through firsthand experience. It would be a dream to use that to bring additional dollars to the market. I’m the man for the job. I’ve already shown my dedication to the futures of working reporters and our students. My site already gets thousands of visitors per month. Show the world we’re open for business, and we’ll be in business a long, long time.

So now it comes down to my audience. If you know businesses, suppliers, nonprofits, independent contractors, or schools that might help fund this initiative, please ask them to fill out the survey linked at the top. Thank you.

Ad data shared by Stenonymous.com in February 2023.

A Puppet Explains Stenonymous and Court Reporting. Seriously!?

More court reporting content for the masses. With more support from stenographers like you, we’ll be moving onto bigger and better things. But if this is entertaining for you, consider dropping me a dollar using the front page of Stenonymous.com.

According to available statistics, court reporters pull in at least $1.2 billion a year across the industry. A fraction of that would supercharge my content creation. With more support I’ll be able to figuratively grind the STTI Bloc into paste. If you ever get tired of playing defense, consider cutting me loose and watching me work.

Propaganda Guide for the Smart Steno Consumer

For those of you that haven’t read up on propaganda and persuasion techniques, you still probably won’t be too surprised to know that leaders, corporations, and all manner of people try to exert control. This usually isn’t done by direct threat or force, but by persuasion. Advertising, to some extent, can be propaganda. Networks of influencers are the modern machine that keep people scrolling. There are innumerable ways that forces we don’t even think about are trying to get in our heads. I confess that I, too, use some of the techniques I’m about to talk about. But that’s the point, if the consumer is aware, then they can make better choices. I am going to be stepping up my media game this year. You’ve all got to be ready.

Types of Propaganda:

Bandwagon Propaganda.

As humans we generally have a desire or drive to fit in. We’re interested in what’s trending for these reasons. When someone is trying to convince you that everyone else is doing it, they might be propagandizing you. In court reporting this is fairly common, software vendors will try to convince you to get on the new thing because everyone is getting on the new thing, but really they just need you buying equipment to feed the economic engines.

Card Stacking Propaganda.

This is about mentioning the positives without the negatives. Stacking all those positive cards on top of each other so that you don’t look at the negatives underneath. To be fair, this is actually a presentation technique and life tip, and I use it often, so I can’t knock it.

Plain Folk Propaganda.

This form of propaganda deals with displaying regular, relatable people and faces in advertising. It can kind of tie into the idea that “normal people” use a product or service being pitched.

Testimonial Propaganda.

This is about getting popular or famous people to pitch a product or service and is viewed as the opposite of plain folk propaganda. This tries to display people you look up to using a product or service so that you use it too.

Glittering Generality Propaganda.

This is when they use corporate speak that doesn’t really mean anything. Things like “we’ll be there for you” or “on your side.” Things that make you feel good, but don’t really convey a message or promise.

Name Calling Propaganda.

This is pretty rare in the corporate world, which is why I use it. This is exactly what it sounds like. Characterizing people. Calling people names. A fraud, a fake, a liar. It’s nasty stuff. I think my first use of this was when I called Frank N Sense a monster. Still kind of a monster. They posted that the NCRA board should resign. I honestly can’t agree. The NCRA board has the profession’s best interests at heart. Everybody has to follow through with what they know and believe in their hearts. It’s going to be just a little different for each of us. But I think they’re doing a damn good job this year and last. But anyway, name calling, yeah.

Transfer Propaganda.

This is when the propagandist uses something they believe will resonate with you in their messaging. Things like using a person’s religion to sell them things, or as I’ve said from our field, the “democratization of technology.” Most people like democracy, right? Transfer propaganda! If they’re using a vague concept related to something you love, it might be a flag.

Ad Nauseam Propaganda.

This is about messaging. Constant messaging so that you remember the brand. When I’m feeling healthy, I’m a little guilty of this, because I can write a lot more.

Stereotyping & Appeal to Prejudice Propaganda.

This is a big one. Pretty much every major player on the field is using this one against court reporters right now. We all have certain beliefs about digital reporters. We saw it when Verbit called them low skill. We see it when it’s used as a motivator to get people engaging with associations. We see corporations using it to eradicate us, pretending we’re obsolete because that’s our stereotype. The bottom line is that these players understand you. They understand how you think and what you like and don’t like. They understand how you feel about yourself. They’re going to be thinking about how to extract more money from you using that information. This was also effectively used to divide reporters, because for the last decade we were all on this “realtime is the future, everyone must tech up” drive, getting down on people who didn’t play the tech consumer game, and then when everybody sold enough equipment and training there, they packed up and went digital. This is why I have identified group think as dangerous to the profession. If they know us too well, they can manipulate more dollars out of us without giving us enough benefit.

Appeal to Fear Propaganda.

This is about using fear to get people to do things. It can be a product meant to alleviate a fear built up through advertising or it can be, in my opinion, putting you in a position of fear. On the topic of fear build up through advertising, Stenograph did this when it did its keyless drive. Gotta go keyless! Gotta buy the next thing! Gotta buy the new machine! We can all respect making money, but at a certain point, it’s just unnecessary oversaturation of the market. In terms of putting you in a position of fear, companies are doing it right now every day. They’re showing that they’re resolved to expand and switch to digital. They’re pressuring reporters to go digital, and conveniently buy their training and equipment. I think I’ve said this before, but if someone is scaring you, you might be getting propagandized.

Now You Know

When you start looking for these things, you will find them. We will all, one time or another, fall victim to propaganda. Sometimes it’s for a cause we really believe in. Sometimes it’s something we don’t really need in our lives. Sometimes it is the more comforting thing to allow ourselves to be propagandized.

Now, I should clarify, when I use these techniques, I do so for advancing truth and knowledge. All I have documented has been my honest perspective and recording. But in the end, people read and donate because it’s interesting, not because it’s honest. So if you catch me using some media tricks, it’s about keeping it interesting.

I’ve got some ideas in the oven! Get all your friends subscribed!

California Lawyer Cold Calling List For Sale

For court reporting companies and entrepreneurs seeking a listing of lawyers for cold calling operations in California, this spreadsheet provides over 1,200 law firms and their phone numbers in simple xlsx format. You can use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to open it. The current price is $120, about $0.10 per listing.

Traditionally, big box companies have been better at marketing and sales. It is my hope that making this list available to our field of entrepreneurs at a reasonable price helps drive new court reporting ventures and encourages court reporting firms to seek out their own cold calling, sales, and marketing professionals. The volume of California court reporting work makes it an attractive market for digital court reporting infiltration, so getting on top of the sales & marketing game there is paramount if we want a healthy field. First step? Building a list of potential leads. Next step? Development of a cold calling pitch or plan. Then it’s just a matter of making the calls or hiring talent to make the calls. Now the first step is all yours for $120.

Over the coming months, I’ll be making efforts to produce more tools to give stenographers an edge in the business world. Sales will ultimately help drive that activity, so I am very grateful for all purchases.

California Lawyer List

›.xlsx

$120.00

Releasing Stenonymous June 2022 Ad Report

Last year, stenographers funded this blog to the tune of thousands of dollars. I am releasing an ad report that reveals the statistics and nature of the ads launched in the last two years. It is my hope that this will have two impacts. One, I’d like my audience to know how some of the money that flows in is spent, but also see that I was spending money to fight for us well before this blog was pulling in any substantial money. I believe that will increase confidence in the blog. Two, I hope that this will help others that are considering advertising compare costs. I see a world where we all benefit from public data, increased awareness, and increased knowledge.

If you feel this report is valuable, feel free to use the donation box at the bottom of this page to contribute to more Stenonymous activity. During the study period in this report, over half a million people were reached across Facebook and Twitter.

You can download the full report here:

Stenonymous-June-2022-Ad-Report Download

Here are some highlights from the speculations segment of the report:

Here are some highlights from the conclusions segment of the report:

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Does Stenonymous Spend More On Steno Ads Than US Legal?

When you care about something, how difficult is it to do? I can only go by my own experiences here. I hate calling lawyers. A family member got fired and there was potentially an attached legal issue. I was on the phone chain calling lawyers for them until I found one that could speak to the family member that same day. I don’t have any desire to be a public speaker, but I figured it out when I thought our profession might need it. US Legal, by all appearances, cares a lot about attracting digital reporters and strengthening AAERT.

I would love to talk to you too, senior recruiter.

In fairness, US Legal does have a reporter corner and a few spots on their site where they specifically mention stenography. But we have to look at the totality of the circumstances to decide whether this is out of genuine care or whether it’s a facade to point at and say “look, we care!” It’s been known for a while that US Legal is backing digital reporting. They bought out Stenotrain, made some announcements to look good, and killed it. Now reporters are getting offers to join USL as long as reporters drop the stenotype and fall in line with whatever junk USL wants to peddle to consumers. Again, I have to look at my own experiences, and when I don’t advertise very much, my site can get as little as 500 views a year.

Meanwhile, when I spend a few hundred bucks on an ad, I get the word steno in front of thousands of people.

A seven-nation army couldn’t hold me back.

Hopefully the point is pretty clear. If and when they cry shortage and say they just can’t fill the seats, it’s a lie. According to Owler, they have a revenue of over $100 million. They’re taking that money and betting it against stenographic court reporters. There are national, state, and nonprofit databases of reporters. This is a game to take our relatively high-paying jobs and organized, educated workforce, and replace them with low-paying jobs and people who won’t have the same ethics culture we do.

It’s a game I need some help winning. All corporations are made up of people. Educate those people on the truth, and just maybe they’ll realize they’re risking everything by backing the losing horse. If you happen to get a message from one of the recruiters working on this, please don’t blast them, but let them know what’s happening. Chances are good they have no idea.

I do wish him luck and success. But I also hope he finds a better employer.

CART v Autocraption, A Strategic Overview For Captioners

With the news that Verbit has bought VITAC, there was some concern on steno social media. For a quick history on Verbit, it’s a company that claimed 99 percent accuracy in its series A funding. In its series B funding it was admitted that their technology would not replace the human. Succinctly, Verbit is a transcription company where its transcribers are assisted by machine learning voice recognition. Of course, this all has the side effect of demoralizing stenographers who sometimes think “wow, the technology really can do my job” because nobody has the time to be a walking encyclopedia.

But this idea that Verbit, a company started in 2016, figured out some super secret knowledge is not realistic. To put voice recognition into perspective, it’s estimated to be a market worth many billions of dollars. Microsoft is seeking to buy Nuance, the maker of Dragon, for about $20 billion. Microsoft has reportedly posted revenue over $40 billion and profit of over $15 billion. Verbit, by comparison, has raised “over $100 million” in investor money. It reports revenue in the millions and positive cash flow. Another company that reports revenue in the millions and positive cash flow? VIQ Solutions, parent of Net Transcripts. As described in a previous post, VIQ Solutions has reported millions in revenue and a positive cash flow since 2016. What’s missing? The income. Since 2016, the company hasn’t been profitable.

I might actually buy some stock, just in case.

Obviously, things can turn around, companies can go long periods of time without making a profit, bounce back, and be profitable. Companies can also go bankrupt and dissolve a la Circuit City or be restructured like JCPenney. The point is not to disparage companies on their financials, but to give stenographic captioners real perspective on the information they’re reading. So, when you see this blurb here, what comes to mind?

Hint. What’s not being mentioned? Profit. While this is not conclusive, the lack of any mention of profit tells me the cash flow and revenue is fine, but there are no big profits as of yet. Cash flow can come from many things, including investors, asset sales, and borrowing money. Most of us probably make in the ballpark of $50,000 to $100,000. Reading that a company raised $60 million, ostensibly to cut in on your job, can be pretty disheartening. Not so once you see that they’re a tiny fraction of the overall picture and that players far bigger than them have not taken your job despite working on the technology for decades.

Moreover, we have a consumer protection crisis on our hands. At least one study in 2020 showed that automatic speech recognition can be 25 to 80 percent accurate depending on who’s speaking. There are many caption advocates out there, such as Meryl Evans, trying to raise awareness on the importance of caption quality. The messaging is very clear: automatic captions are crap (autocraptions), they are often worse than having no captions, and a single wrong word can cause great confusion for someone relying on the captions. Just go see what people on Twitter are saying about #autocraptions. “#NoMoreCraptions. Thank you content creators that do not rely on them!”

Caring about captioning for people who need it makes your brand look good?
I wonder if a brand that looks good makes more money than one that doesn’t…

This isn’t something I’m making up. Anybody in any kind of captioning or transcription business agrees a human is required. Just check out Cielo24’s captioning guide and accuracy table.

Well, this is a little silly. Nobody advertises 60 percent accuracy. It just happens. Ask my boss.

If someone’s talking about an accuracy level of 95 percent or better, they’re talking about human-verified captions. If you, captioner, were not worried about Rev taking away your job with its alleged 50,000 transcribers, then you should not throw in the towel because of Verbit and its alleged 30,000 transcribers. We do not know how much of that is overlap. We do not know how much of that is “this transcriber transcribed for us once and is therefore part of our ‘team.'” We do not know how well transcription skills will fit into the fix-garbage-AI-transcription model. The low pay and mistreatment that comes with “working for” these types of companies is going to drive people away. Think of all the experiences you’ve had to get you to your skill level today. Would you have gotten there with lower compensation, or would you have simply moved on to something easier?

Verbit’s doing exceptionally well in its presentation. It makes claims that would cost quite a bit of time and/or money to disprove, and the results of any such investigation would be questioned by whoever it did not favor. It’s a very old game of making claims faster than they can be disproven and watching the fact checkers give you more press as they attempt to parse what’s true, partially true, and totally false. This doesn’t happen just in the captioning arena, it happens in legal reporting too.

$0/page. Remember what I said about no profit?
It doesn’t matter if they’re never profitable. It only matters that they can keep attracting investor money.

This seems like a terrifying list of capabilities. But, again, this is an old game. Watch how easy it is.

It took me 15 seconds to say six lies, one partial truth, and one actual truth. Many of you have known me for years. What was what? How long will it take you to figure out what was what? How long would it take you to prove to another person what’s true and what’s false? This is, in part, why it is easier for falsehoods to spread than the truth. This is why in court and in science, the person making a claim has to prove their claim. We have no such luxury in the business world. As an example, many years ago in the gaming industry Peter Molyneux got up on stage and demo’d Milo. He said it was real tech. Here was this dynamically interactive virtual boy who’d be able to understand gamers and their actions. We watched it with our own eyes. It was so cool. It was BS. It was very likely scripted. There was no such technology and there is no such technology today, over eleven years later. Do you think Peter, Microsoft, or anybody got in trouble for that? Nope. In fact, years later, he claimed “it was real, honest.”

Here’s the point: Legal reporters and captioners are going to be facing off with these claims for an indeterminate amount of time. These folks are going to be marketing to your clients hard. And I just showed you via the gaming industry that there are zero consequences for lying and that anything that is lied about can just be brushed up with another lie. There will be, more or less, two choices for every single one of you.

Compete / Advocate. Start companies. Ally with deaf advocates.
Watch it happen.

I have basically dedicated Stenonymous to providing facts, figures, and ways that stenographers can come out of the “sky is falling” mindset. But I’m one guy. I’m an official in New York. Science says there’s a good chance what we expect to happen will happen and that’s why I fight like hell to get all of you to expect us to win. That’s also why these companies repeat year after year that they’re going to automate away the jobs even when there’s zero merit or demand for an idea. You now see that companies can operate without making any profit, companies can lie, much bigger companies haven’t muscled in on your job, and that the giant Microsoft presumably looked at Verbit, looked at Nuance, and chose Nuance.

I’m not a neo-luddite. If the technology is that good, let it be that good. Let my job vanish. Fire me tomorrow. But facts are facts, and the fact is that tech sellers take the excellent work of brilliant programmers and say the tech is ready for prime time way before it is. They never bother to mention the drawbacks. Self-driving cars and trucks are on the way, don’t worry about whether it kills someone. Robots can do all these wonderful things, forget that injuries are up where they’re in heaviest use. Solar Roadways were going to solve the world’s energy problems but couldn’t generate any energy or be driven on. In our field, lives and important stakeholders are in danger. What happens when there’s a hurricane on the way and the AI captioning tells deaf people to drive towards danger?

Again, two choices, and I’m hoping stenographic captioners don’t watch it happen.

Facebook Boosting 101

If you’re looking to promote your steno nonprofit or your primary steno business, the numbers don’t lie, marketing is going to bring more eyes to what you’re selling. That’s a common-sense statement, but let’s drive it home. This blog, on average, will get about 500 to 1000 unique visitors a month and about double the views or clicks. That’s just me writing what I write and sharing it on Facebook. In honor of CRCW 2021, I ended up posting a lot this month. I published over a dozen articles, and the “average” did not change much. Now we’ll compare that to December 2020, where I wrote three posts and advertised two on Facebook.

I wrote my heart out and it’s not even close.

About 700 visitors, 14 posts, that’s about 50 visitors a post. That’s compared to nearly 3,000 visitors, three posts, a thousand visitors a post. About $200 gave me 20x the reach.

Yay for me. Why am I writing this? To help you. On Facebook today there are groups and pages. Groups serve, more or less, as discussion boards. Pages are more like ad space. They’re promotional and you generally control the content on there. You can have a page and a group, and you can have a page act as an admin to a group. There’s one major difference between the two. As best I can tell, groups cannot advertise. Pages, on the other hand, have the power to boost posts. So if you’re looking to market, get yourself a page.

What kind of monster doesn’t even like his own page?

When you create a post on your page, you have the option to boost a post. Check the boost post option before you make your post to get to the “boost” controls.

After you click post, you’ll get transported to the magic world of the boost page. That’s going to look like the image below, hopefully, and it’s going to give you options to put in your budget, and more importantly, edit your audience. Generally if you put in more money, they’ll estimate more views per day. If you put in more days, you’ll get fewer views per day, but the ad will run longer. There are some minimums, but you can go as low or as high as you want. Again, in December, I felt comfortable spending in the ballpark of $200 for week-long campaigns. What will you see in the edit audience tab?

You get to target, gender, age, location, and then add specific demographics.

The only thing you should know is your audience has to be broad enough to run the ad. If you’re way too specific, it blocks you. For example, I started clicking demographics for all these things and the potential reach was only about 5,000. I clicked “lawyer” and the potential reach jumped up by millions.

That’s all there is to it! There are a few other options, like whether you want your ad to run in Facebook, Messenger, or both, and whether you want to use Facebook Pixel. My personal preference? I run the ad only Facebook and do nothing with Facebook Pixel. I know a lot of us trust and believe in face-to-face conversations. We want to grow deep connections and be one with our audience. But again, we’re looking at 20x the reach with a small budget.

With that in mind, I’ll be launching and advertising a post on March 1 directed at digital reporters and transcribers. Here’s my thinking: We have this whole group of people who probably like sitting in court proceedings, the companies they work for are not telling them about steno, or maybe even lying to them about steno. It’s time to break that in half and get the good ones over to us. If you support that, or even if you’re just grateful for the information in this post, feel free to donate here. I’m very grateful to people that have donated in the past. Every dollar helps keep this place ad-free. We don’t want to go back to that time.

Alternatively, if you’re tired of my blog, check out Glen Warner’s or Matt Moss’s. There are so many out there, including businesses like Migliore & Associates or MGR. It can be really heartening to see the incredible amount of information and opinions we have out there. Highly suggest checking out any of them.

Veritext Update, March 2019

Introduction & History.

First and foremost: This post is going to get into past history and then go into more recent history. In the more recent history, in order to prove that what we’re saying is true, there are screen shots of a person’s LinkedIn social media. We’re free to discuss that and we’re free to say how we feel, but any reader that comes here should be aware that harassment, bullying, menacing, stalking, and defamation are all amoral and illegal. Those things may all open you up to criminal and civil action. If you use our steno news as a gateway for antisocial behavior, do not be surprised if you get police at your door.

Now onto history. Veritext was a leader in working to bolster stenography. A quick Google search will show you that assuming all the media out there to be true or partially true, they are a partner to NCRA and do or did, on some level, and sometimes on an astounding level, support the stenographic methodology for taking the record. It is hard to tell if what follows is a case of Yes, Prime Minister’s advice on backstabbing or a case of the principle of hedging. Veritext proceeded to buy out a lot of stenographic or court reporting companies, including Diamond Reporting here in New York. Next, we caught wind that Veritext was advertising to attorneys that they should change their deposition notices to add language of “stenographic or other means”, presumably so that Veritext could choose to send digital reporters to jobs.

This all ended up culminating in a post where we mirrored SoCalReporter’s ideas and said: We need to stop beating each other up about where we work and start talking solutions. Guess what happened? People started coming up with solutions, and content, and even going so far as to create watchdog groups. We have said this before, but we are seeing a memetic shift. The reporting zeitgeist of silence is over. There are hundreds of voices blogging, talking, and working together to come up with new ideas.

Today & Tomorrow.

So that brings us to the end of February 2019. A woman named Gina Hardin, purportedly a VP of Sales at Veritext, wrote or posted an article about digital reporting being the changing landscape of reporting. There was a great deal of chatter about this, culminating in the post being taken down the night it was posted, and an immediate declaration from Veritext that the post was posted by a former employee and that they had nothing to do with it, honest. This doesn’t pass the colloquial “sniff test” or SMELL test for being true. Why would a former employee try to drum up business for a past employer? In this country, with so few rights for workers, what employee would ever go out on a limb and post something like that without their employer’s explicit permission? Unless you work for the government or have a contract saying otherwise, you can be fired for any reason or no reason, even a made up reason, just not an illegal reason, of which there are very few. The whole thing just doesn’t make sense. And if she’s a former employee, apparently nobody told her, because as of March 2, 2019, she was still listed as working at Veritext, but under the name Gina H. It’s all but undeniable that Veritext is pushing digital, including hiring via their website.

Now, here’s the deal: Some people went online and talked about the typos in the article, or even had personal attacks. It’s not about her. As best we can tell, she’s an employee doing a job, and probably doing it damn well. We make a thousand typos a day unless we’re Super Stenographer. Stenographers, and the entrepreneurs among us, should really be looking at teaming up with salespeople like that who’re dedicated to their job and willing to put themselves out there. Though we have not yet gotten a chance to interview Eve Barrett of Expedite Legal, one of the things she’s alluded to online is there’s an amazing power in human-to-human marketing because of this digital, faceless world. Who is going to be better at human-to-human marketing than someone who is willing to attach their face to the product and pitch? We wouldn’t be surprised if there are stenographic companies looking to poach Gina H. or salespeople like her right now! There’s huge money in this field. Nearly every big agency has a satellite office in every borough of New York City and a cadre of dedicated employees — in other words, there is money to be made in this field, and we shouldn’t be afraid to hire talent when it means a bigger return. Success is often a matter of intelligent delegation. As stenographers, we often let our penchant for perfectionism stand in the way of hiring help and building our brand, perhaps to a fault.

But where does that leave us? Well, we need to recognize that Veritext is apparently willing to lie. Freelancers need to recognize that group boycotts by competitors may fall under antitrust violations. Reporters everywhere need to start acknowledging that the best way to beat ’em might be to just start grabbing clients. It’s time for us to get serious about funding our associations and demanding marketing and entrepreneurial courses. These companies all exist because they got clients off of somebody else. Individually, they may seem bigger or stronger than us because they can outspend us one-on-one, but there’s an inherent power in the fact that if thousands of reporters were to compete directly with them and start poaching clients — which is perfectly legal unless you signed a contract saying you wouldn’t do that or stole a trade secret — they’d be SOL.

For the most ambitious, start looking at fundraising. Start considering all the ways companies come into existence. You very well could be the next nationwide conglomerate. As a matter of fact, if you’re in Illinois, New York, California, or Texas, you are in one of the largest court reporting states in the country, and you have a real shot at seizing the market. Companies rise and fall — but your career is in your hands.

We look forward to the day Veritext sees it’s on the losing side and starts throwing its weight behind stenography again. We look forward to dutifully reporting that right here on this blog. But until that day comes, we encourage fierce competition in this market. Don’t be complacent. Maybe someday we’ll get SLAPP’d for standing up for our profession, but we’re happy to take the heat so that you don’t have to. Be involved. Encourage others to get involved and start building their brand. Know that you are making a difference in how the market and our day-to-day jobs develop.

What Rate Should Freelance Reporters Charge?

This is an interesting question for stenographers across the country. What rate should be charged? What is fair? What is a good amount of money?

I have often simply left the answer at: It should be more. I have a body of work on this site that talks about negotiation, inflation, and makes several cases for higher rates for New York freelance. It bears repeating that in New York, the current private regular rate mandated to be charged by officials is about $4.30 per page. If you’re a freelancer paying your own taxes, advertising, business costs, benefits, or workers compensation insurance, then you should consider trying to make more than that by any means necessary, including realtime, rough, daily delivery, and copy sales. The skills you bring to the table are as important as your ability to negotiate and seek out work.

Without more fanfare, let’s turn to what I did tonight. I designed a very small calculator program that takes the user’s input of how much annual salary they want to make, and divides that by all the different rates someone might charge per page to figure out how many pages you need to make that annual salary. It then takes the pages and divides those pages by 20, assuming that’s how many pages a person transcribes an hour. Then it divides those hours by 7 to tell you how many 7-hour workdays you need to make that money. To tailor this to yourself specifically, you can either edit the calculator, do the calculations manually, or simply half, double, or triple your transcription speed.

I understand that most people do not really do anything with computer code, so I ran the program for several different salary ranges.

These are the calculations if you want to make:

The moral of the story is obvious: The lower your rate is, the more pages you need to make money. The higher your rate is, the fewer pages you need to make money. But to see this in action, let’s just take one point of data: $5.00 per page.

At $5.00 per page, you need about 35 days worth of transcribing to make $25,000 a year.

That’s about 70 days to make $50,000 a year.

That’s 140 7-hour days of transcription to make $100,000 a year.

Anecdotally, if we spend an hour transcribing for every hour we are on the machine, that’s 280 7-hour days of work. There are only 260 weekdays a year. That means to make that $100,000 a year you’re giving up 10 weekends a year at $5.00 a page. Increase the rate to 5.50 and you’re giving up no weekends. 50 cents makes that much of a difference.

Bottom line? Your rate is going to dictate not only your income, but your quality of life. Strive to be a good reporter, know your market, team up with a mentor, and make sure you’re getting paid enough to reach your goals.