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IRT –
Looking for an IT Profession?
From the courthouse to TV
studios, court reporters, deposition reporters, and broadcast captioners are
in demand! The "Occupational Outlook Handbook 2008-2009," released by the
federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), said court reporter employment
will grow by 25 percent through 2016, because of "increasing numbers of
civil and criminal cases" coupled with federal telecommunications
legislation that requires television captioning and the increasing demand
for real-time communication access for people who are deaf and hard of
hearing under the American with Disabilities Act.
Reporting is a career that’s
vital, exciting, and rewarding, with coast-to-coast opportunities at your
fingertips. Reporting has joined the ranks of the IT professions because
computers are an integral part of judicial reporting; and students now have a
choice of becoming broadcast captioners, internet information reporters,
CART providers, scopists, and realtime transcriptionist. Reporters can work
in the legal community, provide communications access for people with
hearing loss, be an independent contractor, or run their own reporting firm. |
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•
Information “court” reporters (including
deposition reporters and broadcast captioners) earn an
average of more than
$64,000 a year.
• Specially trained reporters called broadcast
captioners caption live television programs. Federal
rules
require captioning of hundreds of hours of live programming each week,
creating a surge in
career opportunities.
• About 27% of the reporters in the United
States actually work in court. The majority are
freelance reporters hired by
attorneys to report depositions of potential trial witnesses, and a
growing number work in the exciting field of broadcast captioning.
• A version of the captioning process allows
reporters to provide more personalized services for
deaf and hearing impaired
people through Communication Access Realtime Translation. CART
reporters
accompany deaf clients as needed – for example, to college classes – to provide
an
instant conversion of speech into text using the reporter’s stenotype machine
linked to a laptop
computer. Reporting agencies that specialize in this service cannot meet the demand.
• Webcasting and reporting to the Internet is a
new field where reporters have found their services
in demand providing realtime
reporting of sales meetings, press conferences, product
introductions and
technical training seminars and instantly transmitting them to all parties
involved via computers. This technology enables participants to receive text via
the Internet, an
online service or their own intranet, all without any special hardware.
• Realtime transcription is another area where,
using the stenotype machine with any word
processing software, the reporter
provides text input for hospitals, insurance companies and
many other businesses
at a rate of 120 words per minute.
•
A scopist is one who edits transcripts with computer-aided transcription
software into English,
correcting mistranslates/untranslates and
employing proper punctuation, English, and formatting
to the official court transcript and/or
deposition. Scopists can work as independent contractors
from their home or work for a freelance
reporting firm.
Reporting educators say prospective students
should be intelligent, disciplined, motivated, computer-literate and have
above-average language skills. Reporting students also need to be able to meet
deadlines, work well under pressure and concentrate for long periods of time.
The opportunities in the reporting and
captioning field are plentiful. Court and deposition reporters will continue to
work within the legal community as it expands in the future, as well as develop
their role as information processors and managers in the business and multimedia
communities. An IRT career allows persons to choose whether or not to be their
own bosses, as many reporters work as independent contractors or own their own
agencies. |
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