Tag: sense

WUNCRA, Knowledge Is Power, Spitballing Is Weak

Wake up, Wake Up NCRA?

It’s that time again to come out and talk about our friends at WUNCRA. Archived here. Though, begrudgingly, we’re going to have to bring out some harsh words. First the good stuff: We love information and we love rhetoric. We want an end to the secrecy that has damaged this field. We want the stenographic modality to be and remain the principal method of reporting nationally. There are legitimate things that Frank N Sense writes about, and we would like that to continue. We have made interesting connections and asked questions ourselves to specific people in the field, and we have had our concerns answered quickly. We want facts and knowledge whenever possible.

Our major problem with the way that Frank N Sense is doing business is that there is often nothing in the way of evidence. It devolves into mindless bullying and name-calling sometimes, as with the Lipstick on a Pig post. He or she denounces secrecy and wants there to be more open policies, but has a very closed gate when it comes to comments. Even in the post, which more or less accuses Stephen Zinone and his company of being an AAERT sellout, there’s a lot of words there, but there is not a single copy of this email. There’s not even proof that Stephen Zinone is a member of AAERT posted at WUNCRA, we had to find it ourselves. The author does not even offer Zinone’s full name, instead referring to him as Steve Z. The post fails to name the two or three past presidents allegedly going to the AAERT convention.

The site isn’t informing the reader what’s going on or what’s happened. This isn’t helpful to anyone who isn’t acutely aware of the immediate topic. It’s doing little more than leading its readers and followers down a dark road of negativity. We’ve hit this trap a time or two on Stenonymous where we expound on an issue that we haven’t explained for newcomers. Listen, none of us are perfect. But we need to face the truth: We have no idea where information is coming from post after post at WUNCRA. As a very astute reader told us about our own posts, without some facts and sources, it’s just words on the internet. We urge WUNCRA to put up this information every time instead of making us search for verification ourselves. This information-vacuum reporting is just a continuation of the old reporting zeitgeist of gatekeeping information. Worse still, there may be a troll at the gate. The writing is so one-sided and bleak that readers are left with hopelessness instead of solutions to move forward.

For the record, we reached out to Stephen Zinone. The response will be linked here. He rightly points out Frank’s trolling nature and explains a bit about what he’s doing. He uses steno reporters and QWERTY transcribers to provide for the consumer. He’s put out ideas about bringing down barriers to entry for steno. He makes an honest case for the fact that people who may have testing issues or inability to compete stenographically should still be able to make an income doing what they love. We believe stenography can remain the dominant method for taking the record, and should even be the only method, but there’s always likely to be at least some market share taken by the other ways. We on Stenonymous encourage stenographers to compete hard! We get the words in four or five times faster than the average typist, and have a rich history and institutional knowledge that goes unmatched by others. Even our most stinging articles against companies were not so much about the usage of recording itself, but the perceived pushing of recording over stenographers even when steno should be first. As best we can tell, Stephen Zinone isn’t doing that here.

I suppose we either will or won’t be convincing to Frank N Sense to release “more better” info in the future. Maybe we’ll convince some readers to think critically and ask questions. Maybe anyone feeling demoralized by Frank’s writings can look at this and feel ready to go out and make steno shine. We are sensitive to that writer’s position of being an anonymous person that may want to redact certain sources for any number of reasons. That admitted, we’ve had gripes in the past too. We are worried that this constant negative droning combined with the diminished effervescence of the status quo steno supporters are going to harm stenography more than help. In plain English: Offer up some real solutions or suggestions. We know you have that power to empower your audience. Give people ideas to fight and win.

In that vein, here is our own message to Zinone, Hunt, and any business owner who may be a steno ally but has decided to join AAERT to see how it might impact your business or shape the landscape: Pass us back some info. We’ll redact pretty much what you want. You can pass it through an email proxy, anonymous Imgur links, audio recordings, whatever makes you happy. But if you’re truly getting an understanding of these things and how they might impact the field, share that knowledge. Make us powerful. I’m sitting at ChristopherDay227@gmail.com. We’ll get the message out.

And to the NCRA: While we have a very different take on your message than Frank, and we don’t agree in breaking down what’s left and distributing it to members, we do think there are things to learn in terms of communication, outreach, and transparency, but you are off to a powerful start in 2019. Keep up the transformation. Don’t be afraid to admit past mistakes. Don’t be afraid to say here is a roadmap and our ideas for fixing XYZ situation. Perhaps even consider coming up with a few major initiatives, creating a board’s recommendation, announcing you’re doing all of this so people buy a membership so that they can vote, and then letting the membership vote direct on those initiatives. Make membership feel powerful, and I have a very strong feeling that membership will empower the organization. It’s a symbiotic relationship dependent on leaders solving the age-old question of how to motivate people to act. Specifically, how to get people to open the wallet and fund the future of steno legislation, education, and awareness.

To the newcomer: Welcome to the family. Steno is a huge field with a lot of opportunities. We’ve had some issues in that past leaders of steno and NCRA have thrown their support behind recording technology. Note that the NCRA’s bylaws state it is a promoter only of the stenographic medium of record making. Frank’s message is about exposing the fact that we may have obstacles to overcome. Let mine be about what you can do about it:

    Join professional steno organizations. You matter.
    Identify issues in your market and community.
    Discuss these issues, propose solutions.
    If the association is not helpful after a proposal, identify why they’re not helping. Suggest ways they can improve or identify ways to improve the proposal.
    If no improvement is forthcoming, consider forming a new trade association or group for the purpose of education, representation, and leading the field. Consider having transparency, such as NCRA’s public posting of its bylaws

Look at Stenonymous. It started as a stopgap to answer student questions and preserve information and has built up a following of hundreds. Lots to improve upon, but the point stands: If we could do this, anyone can do this, and if a lot of us take a stand, we will see an incredible renaissance in this field. Be a part of that!

The Frank N Sense Monster

Came to my attention maybe a year ago that there is an overall interesting blog, Wake Up NCRA. It’s interesting because it’s, as best I can tell, anonymous, someone very concerned about the field, and someone willing to be pretty honest about their feelings. They even take a page from my book, or perhaps I from theirs, and use the word we occasionally so you can’t really tell for sure whether it’s one person or many.

For some the mix of anonymity and honesty doesn’t make sense, but there are honest reasons for wanting anonymity. Batman says it toward the end of the Dark Knight Rises, the mask is not for you, it’s to protect the people you care about. In a real world context, if “they” know who you are they can apply pressure. An agency can “fire” you. Your family can go from pretty comfortable to struggling. You don’t have to be saying anything wrong, just something someone doesn’t like. It’s private sector and it’s the last effective method on censoring someone’s free speech.

All that said, I’ve used the term monster, so I ought to get explaining that. I had linked the article in question at the top. It’s actually perfect. It talks about a group apparently calling itself SOS Plan B, talks about how this group seems to be interested in audio recording, and says straight out: The plan B is steno needs to be the gold, silver, bronze standard. I have mirrored this concern in the past. Realtime will mean nothing if it’s the last of stenographic reporters. Chess is kind of hard to win if all you have left are the king and queen.

Then out comes the monster. The author says the solutions to the reporter shortage are firms paying reporters a fair wage, firms networking, and the shortage scaling back the contracts that sell us so cheaply. And all these things I believe in pretty deeply. I’d love it if that would happen, but I do not believe it is realistic.

  1. The rates will always be a struggle because companies will always want more money.
  2. The companies network now and from my experience it always ended up with me taking a job with ridiculous conditions like don’t say who you work for, change your transcript from your usual 60 page layout to our 30 page layout that we definitely don’t change back, and get an order form but don’t talk to the client.
  3. The shortage will make it easier for firms to switch to electronic reporting and there will be fewer of us in opposition. And this is where I just get confused. It takes probably a minimum of a year to train a court reporting savant. It doesn’t take them much time at all to train someone to set up equipment and take notes during a proceeding. Our barrier to entry is already worlds higher, and if the jobs don’t get covered, people become more okay with alternatives.

That’s the monster. This is an apath’s wet dream. Do nothing. Support the shortage, the whole train falls apart. Dave Wenhold was at a NYSCRA meetup years ago. Told us he did some advisory work for a group of officials elsewhere, some other state. They were unhappy with their conditions and wanted to strike. Being a pretty politically smart guy, his advice was do not strike. They struck. For two days the courthouse was down, and then they hauled in audio equipment, and that was the end of that. Was his story true? I don’t know. Was the message of his story powerful? Oh yes. If you’re not there to do the job, the powers that be will come up with some other way to get the job done. We are valuable. We are so valuable that I have a wonderful career with wonderful colleagues and a whole universe of talented contemporaries. But we are not irreplaceable in the eyes of the people that use us. We are a means to an end. And if we sit back and let stuff happen, we’ll be proverbial fish in a barrel. But what good am I if I do not offer some solutions to the shortage problem? Some of what we at Stenonymous have crafted up:

  1. Promote all forms of stenographic education, from the traditional to the open source. I’m talking to you, NCRA.
  2. Create more and better open source learning materials.
  3. Create networks of people that can go to the high schools and promote court reporting. The logistics of funding this or finding volunteers is the major barrier.
  4. Support the students heavily through formal and informal mentorship. Rework mentorship to include education about the market in which the reporter expects to work.
  5. Shift association focus somewhat to educating reporters on business principles like negotiation, inflation, labor, et cetera. This is the ultimate battle. If expenses rise and income never does, the business, the reporter, becomes insolvent. Make business knowledge more ubiquitous so that reporters, legally considered to be on the same level as agencies, can actually have a chance here. I’m not talking your savants, I’m talking raise your bottom of the barrel people up so that they can be as good.

A lot of love to Frank N Sense. I know the logistics and long-term fruition of our ideas seem further away than yours. I know it’s harder to build than it is to sit back and hope for the best. It resonates better with people. Who wouldn’t want to just let the shortage happen and everything works out? But I don’t believe in my heart that that’s the way it’ll go. But I do believe there’s a way forward. I do believe that things can always get better. And I believe that we’ll all play an important role in making things better if we care to.