Christopher Day addresses Court Reporter Rates Discussion Facebook Page after 20k reach post about there being no shortage.
The shortage post got a lot of reach. I’ve spent a lot of time documenting and commenting on the state and trajectory of the field. I know people are working hard and don’t have time to read hundreds of posts of modern court reporting market history.
And I honestly don’t want to alarm people, but I’ve always felt a duty to. Because the signs point clearly to lower incomes for the majority of our students absent some kind of intervention. If there’s something special about this field, it’s how we feel about our students. There you are, so many of you, giving dozens, hundreds, thousands of often unpaid hours to helping others succeed and navigate. I would be half the reporter I am today without the people who stood up for and supported me. And I would be double the reporter I am today if I had known half of you.
There’s a lot we can do. Unionization is on the table for some. A private enterprise that starts pulling in significant market share is on the table. Funding and cohesion can make these things a reality in a way that court reporting associations legally can’t. Do I know a guy in finance? Could I make it happen? Yeah. But I’d need significant buy-in from the community.
AI can be a powerful summarization tool. If you are skeptical, despite the negatives of AI, I have to ask you to use it. We can get through this with the best results possible for our students.
(The errors in the AI answer are an integral part of this piece.)
It came to my attention that someone was saying that my Court Reporter Rates Discussion group is illegal. I gave a blanket public response to this. But in the ensuing conversation I had with that someone, it came to light that some people have some deep misconceptions about who I am and what I stand for.
1. Christopher Day is not a communist.
Concerned court reporter asks Christopher Day if he’s a communist.
I haven’t studied economics and economic systems at length. I get that fighting for working people seems pretty communist. But it’s actually a capitalist sentiment. Charging what the market will bear is very capitalist. The laws of the United States allow for us to create conditions where many workers can charge much more for the same labor. These laws also allow employers to purchase media coverage that steers workers away from charging what the market will bear. The median wage of the United States is $30,000. Guess who’s winning. Hint: Not the sellers of labor. By the way, chances are good that you are a seller of labor even if you hire people every now and again.
Just as an aside, a planned economy is a stupid thing. It works in video games like Suzerain. But look at all the things that create the GDP of the United States. Does anyone truly believe that such a thing could ever be planned? It’s much simpler to reconfigure the markets of today to be more pro-people,
2. Christopher Day does not believe in aliens.
Concerned reporter expresses a belief that Christopher Day believes in aliens.
Is it possible that Earth is not the only place with life? Sure. But I don’t spend very much time seriously entertaining the existence of aliens. I do spend a lot of time playing sci-fi games like No Man’s Sky, Starbound, Factorio, or StarCraft. Who needs the real thing? I can march across hundreds of worlds from the safety of my home.
3. Christopher Day’s publications do not harm students.
Concerned reporter urges Christopher Day to reconsider publications on the grounds that they harm students.
Thousands of court reporters are using my rates discussion page. This creates an environment where established players cannot game their ignorance and eagerness. It also creates an environment where the rampant misinformation campaign committed against consumers by the STTI Bloc is made impotent. Some students have even been kind enough to write to me and let me know that my work strengthened their resolve to become a court reporter. The students of today will be infinitely more informed than I was 16 years ago. In my view, this maximizes their chance of success.
4. Christopher Day’s publications do not hurt small businesses.
Concerned reporter writes to Christopher Day about the impact of his publications on small businesses.
The small businesses were being demolished because of the schemes that go on in the modern court reporting business. I fail to see how media that makes plain the malfeasance of large corporations in the space hurts small businesses. If anything, it should drive more consumers toward small businesses that don’t have the capacity to lie to them on an industrial scale.
5. Christopher Day’s publications will not accelerate the adoption of stenotype alternatives.
Concerned reporter lets Christopher Day know that talking about rates will increase the speed at which alternatives are adopted, which is false.
Veritext has been advertising for digital reporters every day for over 2 or 3 years. The larger corporations have made it clear to all but the most indoctrinated / trusting that they are shifting direction. There is literally nothing they could do to adopt digital faster than they are today, so discussing rates doesn’t hurt us. And in fact, it can only help us as digital court reporters realize that they’re being massively underpaid and begin pushing back against that.
As the pay disparity narrows, so too does the incentive to use digital. Once that incentive is gone, and once the corporate executives have been fired for blowing so much money on advertising for digital, the stage is set for the field to be whatever it’s going to be, rather than what big money wants.
6. Christopher Day’s publications have an impact.
Concerned Reporter lets Christopher Day know what Christopher Day does doesn’t matter.
I’ve heard this one a lot about what I do doesn’t matter, won’t do anything, won’t change anything, or whatever the flavor of the day is. I slew the Speech-to-Text Institute and created the largest court reporting blog in the United States, capable of outing multimillion dollar operations for fraud. Hell yeah, I had help, and I’m grateful for it. But it must be getting really uncomfortable for the people in the “this changes nothing” crowd.
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Hey students, if you’re reading, all through your life people are going to put you down like they put me down. Your idea won’t work. You won’t do XYZ. You can’t do XYZ. Take constructive criticism as best you can. But realize that sometimes put downs are put on you just because someone wants you to do what they want you to do, and they’ll say anything to get you there. In this case, it’s pretty easy to see that there are some folks out there that want me to shut up. They’ll say anything about me to obtain that result.
You’ve now seen it with your own eyes. Does someone really believe I am a communist that believes in aliens while I hurt small businesses and students, while also believing I can do what I want because it won’t matter? The more likely truth is that they do not understand my ideas, so my ideas are uncomfortable, so they do not like my ideas. And the easiest way to get me to stop spreading those ideas that they don’t like is to inspire doubt within me that makes me silent.
Understanding that social dynamicis key to your success. You will meet many clients and agencies that will do anything, say anything, to get you to work for less, or to do whatever it is they want you to do, because that’s what’s in their best interest. You must have the strength to identify when that is occurring and act in your own best interest.
And court reporters are not an anomaly. This is also done to journalists. I became aware of a young journalist that would receive high praises whenever submitting work for the exposure. When it came to paid articles, those same people singing the high praises would suddenly be nitpicking. The difference wasn’t the journalist’s work, but that the journalist was seeking payment for their work. It benefits publications when journalists feel insecure about the value of their work because it leads them to accepting less money. The people representing those publications figure out pretty quickly that making journalists feel insecure is the fastest way to fatten their bottom line.
You may one day be engaged with someone trying to manipulate you. It is my sincere hope that on that day you have the strength to identify it, remain resolute, and perhaps even use the experience as a springboard to educate the next person.
It is my sincere hope that the students obtain a level of mastery I could never have imagined.
P.S.
To you, friend, thank you for giving me this material. I meant what I said. If ever you need to talk, reach out. Despite what I’ve done here, it will not end up on Stenonymous.
I’m informed that John Jay is now partnered with Veritext.
Of course, I object to this for many reasons. I still believe that stenography will lead to better accuracy outcomes, particularly for minority speakers. In the Testifying While Black study, stenographers were only 80% accurate taking down African American Vernacular English. Laypeople were 40% accurate (pilot study 1). Since emphasis in the above examples is on short-duration training, which accuracy level do we expect from digital reporting?
If Veritext wasn’t threatening the futures of our students with its lies and misinformation, I’d admire the company for its brilliance. It’s set up to earn money from digital, at least according to Twitter.
“They require you to buy their equipment…”
Of course, we still have the fact that we are honest, hard-working people on our side. We still constitute the majority of workers in this field. Our collective voices can still win this. We have a choice to remain silent and resign the future to the agendas of others or resist and lead this field into its next iteration.
Thank you to my readers for informing me of this development. Without you, what am I?
If you have ever doubted that we are under attack as a profession and that the incomes and outcomes of our students are at risk, here is your sign. It is time to be bold. It is time to stand up for the profession that has given us so much. Share this with your fellow colleagues so that they know what’s happening and can begin to talk about solutions.
The available data shows a majority of consumers want a qualified stenographic or stenomask reporter. As I’ve published on this blog in the past, not all court reporting firms are making best efforts to meet demand. So here are an industry insider’s tips for lawyers, law firms, paralegals, and secretaries on finding a stenographer.
NCRA PROLink – The National Court Reporters Association is our industry’s largest trade association and maintains a free national directory of qualified court reporters.
State associations – Many state associations keep “Find A Reporter” tools on their website. Some examples include New York, Florida, Kentucky, Illinois, and California. Even states without a Find A Reporter tool, like Texas, have a number you can call or an email you can write to.
Protect Your Record Project – PYRP is a consumer education nonprofit that has a Find A Stenographer feature.
Ask your court reporting firm if they’re using CoverCrow. The firm may simply work harder to find you a stenographer once it sees you know a thing or two about our field.
Check out stenographer social media. There are public communities where you can ask questions and someone will point you in the right direction. Ask if anyone has a list of court reporting services, like the one I am maintaining for New York.
Some firms, like REC, will attempt to help you find coverage even if they can’t cover. Don’t be afraid to ask your firm for a referral.
This ad will run for at least 7 days via the Stenonymous Facebook page. Anyone that wants to contribute to the blog fund and consumer awareness advertisement, feel free to use the donation box below.
The FTC has changed its complaint procedure. To briefly explain antitrust, companies aren’t allowed to work together to mislead consumers. By setting up dummy sites to mislead student consumers and making the stenographer shortage seem larger than it is, Speech-to-Text Institute, Veritext, and US Legal appear to be doing just that.
Please take five minutes to send this information to the FTC. More attention on the issue means a higher likelihood the government will act. First step, click this link. Now follow the pictures:
Since we are reporting something about a job, click job, investment, or money-making opportunity.Job scam, job listing. This most closely matches what we are reporting.Since our evidence is heaviest on CourtReporterEDU, let’s go after that. You can change the date you first noticed the problem.As you’ll see in my article, it appears this activity is related to BlueLedge. We don’t know that for sure, which is why I write “Unknown – Suspected Ed 2 Go / BlueLedge.” Give the government a brief synopsis of what’s going on. You can copy word-for-word what I write here.
It’s important to mention that the NCRA was lied about. Here is proof.
You’ll have to give the government your contact info. Don’t enter mine.If you own a business damaged by the illegal conduct, feel free to enter its information.Submit your report and get your report number.
Remember, more reports will mean higher likelihood of action. We are a field of nearly 30,000 stenographers being victimized by this illegal corporate conduct. Ask your fellow reporters to take this seriously. Single complaints are not resolved by the FTC. Hundreds or thousands will get their attention.
Students who were misled into digital might be able to get their money back thanks to you. Remember, your action counts.
This likely concludes my work on the illegal conduct angle. In defense of our profession and the law I have spent the last many months documenting the illegal conduct. Now I need associations and stenographers across the country to take action. Feel free to tell the FTC it was my idea. Any agreements that restrain competition are illegal. Bamboozling consumers to affect the market counts. The government relies on Americans like us to report crime. If you were watching a robbery, would you call it in or would you sit by and say “well, no court has told me this is illegal?”
We all have a choice. I hope you call it in on this metaphorical “robbery in progress.”
P.S. Michael McDonner of Kentuckiana attempted to intimidate me by stating I was attempting to conspire with others by trying to get others to act on the illegal conduct. This is an example of the digital camp trying to scare us into inaction. It’s the same reason Naegeli threatened to sue me. I expect members of the digital camp to try to intimidate some of you. Know that arguably all of you with no direct clients are common law employees and not direct competitors and therefore cannot illegally conspire. We’re not the ones benefitting from the illegal market rigging. Do not let these bullying tactics stop you from doing what you know to be right.
At the end of August I posted Becki’s video and wrote about the importance of social media. I also pointed out the preposterous equation that US Legal posted on JD Supra. It was a defining moment for this field. Somebody on the internet who saw us in court was doing a better job at promoting us than the $100 million corporation. That gave me the courage to publish some very heavy content.
Similar to the way she taught me courage, Becki is teaching us all another important lesson. What if we, as a profession, hadn’t shared her initial TikTok? What if Regina DeMoville had not taken the time to talk to her? What if we all just sat back, said “that’s nice,” and went on to the next thing? People like Hauntie, Regina DeMoville, and Becki’s mom changed the future because they cared enough to try. I don’t know Becki, but she also deserves a lot of praise. In a world full of propaganda, she saw truth and picked up the tripod.
By treating people like people, we come that much closer to solving our stenographer shortage. Similarly, by continuing to support our students and people that try out steno, we’ll drive down the failure rates. Please do the decent thing; take the time to sign up as a mentor or take an interest in what students are doing. A word of encouragement or lack thereof can make or break a career.
Those that refuse to treat stenographers as people? They will be dealing with me.
And I am hardly alone. The businesses that support stenographers are ready to grind the ones that don’t into dust.
A student recently explained to me that they had to create a drill for set of briefs they wanted to learn. In my view, the best way to do this would be creating a repetitive dictation of the brief(s) a person wants to drill, marking that for dictation, and then practicing at some kind of speed. I know minimal computer coding, and have made tools to try to help students and educators cut down on busywork in the past, but because my coding knowledge is so limited, I’ve never quite mastered it enough to make it easy for people, and consequently, the tools I’ve designed go underused.
I plan to continue to do research and make a real effort to make these tools accessible, but in the meantime, I have a workaround that anyone can do from their computer in five easy steps.
Step 1: Get the code. Go to my Dropbox, highlight the code text, right click it, and copy it. You can also use CTRL+C when things are highlighted to copy them. Don’t waste your time reading this image, it’s just demonstrative.
Copy it because I’m about to ask you to paste it.
Step 2: Paste the code into this person’s website. Note that when you open the site, they have some code there already. Just paste right over that or even delete it.
I am about to paste right over that code.
Step 3: Once you have pasted the code in, go to line 5. There should be a line that says “possible.” Inside those brackets, you put whatever terms you want to show up in your drill. In order to make this work, every phrase or word you want must be surrounded by quotation marks and separated by commas. In the example below, I show what it would look like if you wanted to drill red, yellow, and green.
Put whatever words you want in there.
Step 4: Once you have set up the words you want to appear in the drill, click the green “run code” button on the bottom right. A black box will pop up. If it says program start, the program is working. If it talks about an error, something went wrong. If it says program complete, it’s all done.
That’s the green run code button. It looks like a sideways green triangle.
Step 5: After approximately one minute, the program will finish. You will have a file called Drill.txt on the left side of the screen. You can copy your drill into Todd Olivas’s slasher to help you mark it for dictation. If you need help dictating, see what I’ve written about that here.
Remember, this works with any words you want, even if they’re from a George Carlin routine.
I know that this is not ideal, but it is a fast and easy way to get long lists of words without having to painstakingly write and copy them multiple times. I really hope it helps. Special thanks to the student that gave me the idea.
Addendum: Shortly after releasing this post I changed the code and Dropbox link to a much faster version of the program. It avoids repeating the same word twice and works in one second instead of fifty. The only drawback is that if you only put one item in your word list, the program will run forever without giving you an error message. Please put at least two items in the list.
Additionally, after sharing what I was working on with the Open Steno community, Joshua Grams created an HTML file that is much easier to use. Just download it and double click to open it in your browser. It does not randomize the words, but it does repeat whatever you type into it as many times as you ask it to.
Allie Hall is a reporter and educator who has made amazing strides in getting schools to pick up court reporting programs and getting students filling those programs. Some months ago, a group of working reporters came together under Allie’s guidance and leadership, and with additional help from co-admin Traci Mertens, the group has managed to donate thousands to new reporters and students in need.
If you are a working reporter or CART writer looking to give back, please reach out about joining the group. There is a fundraiser currently ongoing, and working reporters may donate ten to twenty dollars to help meet students’ needs.
Working reporters may donate via:
Venmo: Allison-Hall-89
PayPal: allie441@gmail.com
Google Pay: allie441@gmail.com
There is truly no contribution too small. If you’ve got an extra ten dollars to put down on a student, consider sending it along to Allie today! I am a contributing member of the group, and I have rarely ever seen such energy and accountability in a grassroots fundraiser. This is something special, it’s something I really support, and I know the money is going to making the road that young professionals have to travel just a little bit less bumpy. Most of us can look back at our student years and say “I wish I had…” Now we get to be a part of making sure the students of tomorrow have!
There are several opportunities available to stenography students this month, and students should be on the lookout for opportunities whenever possible. There are a number of NCRA scholarships, including the Milton H. Wright scholarship, with a deadline of March 1.
California Court Reporters Association has announced the chance for students to win a free membership. The deadline is much tighter, February 14, but it’s a chance to get connected with just one of the many professional associations that cares about court reporters. Rumor has it that it’s open to students anywhere in the country, so court reporting and captioning students interested in CCRA membership, jump on this. CCRA’s contest highlights something very important in the stenographic reporting world. Students are making a big difference. Whether it’s creating new and amazing podcast content or creating TikTok sensations, you can be a part of making that difference and bringing attention to our field in a way that old people like me can’t. And remember, age is a state of mind!
Project Steno’s Merit Award Program is also available. If you are hitting speed goals rapidly and meet the requirements, you could be eligible for up to $2,000 according to their website.
New York students, please keep an eye out for more information on the Horizon Scholarship Fund. There are reporters donating every single year to ensure there is money set aside for students just like you. The website has not yet been updated, but there is no doubt in my mind that updated information will be available soon.
Finally, as a special treat for anybody that actually reads my blog, enter to win a $50 Steno Swag gift card. Enter your e-mail here by March 1, 2021 to be eligible to win. I will be using my extremely top secret random number generator to pick a winner.
Anyone that attended the NYSCRA Student Panel, in addition to hearing me ramble, got to hear from Meredith Bonn, a past NYSCRA President. She’s the embodiment of her workshop, Power of the Positive Attitude, and she made an important point. These scholarships, grants, and programs, can sometimes have very few applicants. You could have as big as a one out of thirteen shot at money for your stenographic education. For some perspective, the odds of winning the lotto can be as low as one out of 300 million. So do yourself a favor, have a positive attitude, take some time out to check whether or not you are eligible, and make an entry in some of these programs. Worst case scenario, you’re just about where you started. Best case scenario, hundreds or thousands of dollars in aid that you don’t have to worry about!
NYSCRA’s got an upcoming webinar that all students are encouraged to register for. RSVP is required for security. I’m going to be talking about everyone’s favorite topic, politics and legislation. My colleagues are going to be discussing important things like CAT software, words, CART v traditional freelance and deposition reporting, money, and associations. If you don’t believe me, check the flyer, it’s happening. As many who saw our last webinar will know, we go through our agenda and then allow questions from the audience. Questions that we don’t readily have an answer for can be addressed as an addendum or in a supplemental followup.
As for general NYSCRA news, we always need students and mentors signing up for the mentorship program. Everybody’s got value. Everybody’s got a superpower. So if you want to reach out to a board member and let them know yours, definitely do. The bottom line is when there’s an event, or a workshop idea, or even just time to spotlight someone in our quarterly newsletter, The Transcript, outreach can make all the difference. Also, if you haven’t had a chance to renew this year, renewals are open and reporters can get a little more exposure via the Find A Reporter feature on the site.
There are a lot of great times ahead. For stenographers and students, this is or will be your association. Come join us on May 20th and let’s all keep 2020 going strong!
