Court reporter shortage cutting deep

  The federal Telecommunications Act boosted demand for court reporters by mandating large increases in the numbers and types of broadcasts that must be closed-captioned as well as other spoken testimony or information that must be read, searched and archived. While that move alone should have boosted the numbers of court reporters, their numbers are dwindling to alarming levels.  The National Court Reporters Association reports a downward trend in the number of court reporters graduating this year from NCRA-certified programs, at the very time that more are needed for assignments in television studios, classrooms, conferences, even cathedrals or theaters, as well as courthouses and law offices. Work is plentiful in government, professional firms or freelancing.  Annual earnings often exceed $70,000. The number of schools taking part in NCRA’s certification programs and their graduates have steadily declined over the decade.  Almost 1,000 students graduated from more than 100 NCRA-certified schools in 1996. This year, 62 certified programs across the U.S. will graduate fewer than 350 court reporters. Link: Graduation trends in NCRA-certified programs says Reesa Parker, NCRA’s president, As a result of the shortage the deadline set by the Telecommunications Act was missed for closed-captioning of all new television programs in English.  Millions of hard-of-hearing Americans were left without access to programming and critical emergency information, the NCRA says.  To help meet the need for court reporters, NCRA is reaching out to potential students at http://www.bestfuture.com/.  In addition, bills before the Senate and House call for competitive grants to train captioners and reporters who specialize in realtime and Communication Access Realtime Translation. CART provides an immediate translation of all spoken words and environmental sounds in academic, civic, religious or cultural events for those who are deaf, have hearing loss or are learning English as a second language. The US Department of Labor says despite increasing numbers of civil and criminal cases, budget constraints are expected to limit the ability of Federal, State, and local courts to expand, thereby also limiting the demand for traditional court reporting services in courtrooms and other legal venues. Further, because of the difficulty in attracting workers and in efforts to control costs, many courtrooms have installed tape recorders that are maintained by electronic court reporters and transcribers to record court proceedings. Some other court reporting facts:  ·          The US Department of Labor projects that court reporting job opportunities will grow as fast as the average for all occupations through 2012. ·          Captioning of live television programs is done by specially trained court reporters called broadcast captioners. Federal rules require captioning of hundreds of hours of live programming each week, creating a surge in career opportunities for people with the right skills.  ·          About 27% of the court reporters in the United States actually work in court. The majority are freelance reporters hired by attorneys to create verbatim transcripts of pretrial depositions of potential trial witnesses. ·          Some reporters use a form of captioning to provide more personalized services for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing through Communication Access Realtime Translation. CART reporters accompany deaf clients as needed – for example, to college classes – to provide instant conversion of speech into text. Reporting companies that provide this service cannot meet the demand. A couple of reporting-related TV classics have been posted on YouTube. In one from the Carol Burnett Show from the 1970s, one from Allen Funt’s Candid Camera, and there’s always On the Depo Trail.