NEWSrelease

News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.

Date: May 7, 2002

Contact: Jay Feinberg

703-917-7600 (V/TTY)

703-917-9853 (FAX)

jfeinberg@ncicap.org

National Captioning Institute and Court Reporting Institute of Dallas Launch a New Training Program for Real-Time Captioning

Program Will Help Alleviate Shortage of People to Caption Live Television Programming

Washington, DC—The National Captioning Institute (NCI), in conjunction with the Court Reporting Institute of Dallas (CRID), has launched a unique new training program to incorporate advanced real-time captioning as a complementary extra to the curriculum at one of the nation’s leading schools for court reporters.

Real-time captioners are in short supply as the television networks steadily increase the amount of live programming available with closed captioning. Demand for real-time captioners will continue to grow as more live programs are captioned to meet Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations requiring captioning of virtually 100% of new English language programming by 2006.

“In the past, we’ve recruited top graduates of court reporting colleges like CRID, and given them extensive additional training in real-time captioning at NCI’s Virginia headquarters,” commented NCI President and COO Jack Gates. “With this wonderful partnership, we are taking full advantage of CRID’s tremendous technical resources, introducing students to supplemental real-time writing techniques at an advanced stage in their training, and creating extremely well-trained reporters.”

NCI generally provides students with three to six months of additional training before they begin to create live captions for television. “Overall, it takes between 18 and 24 months of NCI training before reporters are up to full-speed real-time captioning,” stated NCI’s Manager of Real-Time Captioning Services Karen Finkelstein. “By incorporating advanced real-time writing into the CRID curriculum, those who apply and are accepted can be months closer to being ‘on-air’ ready when they graduate. They also have a much clearer idea of what the job of a real-time captioner entails before both they and NCI make a huge investment in training.”

The pilot course, which consisted of six eight-hour classes over a twelve-week period last fall, was developed by Finkelstein, Jim Hall and Darlene Parker, also of NCI. They also taught the course. Finkelstein and Parker are two of the three authors of the “Real-Time Writing Guide” used by the National Court Reporters Association in training programs nationwide.

Eric S. Juhlin, President and Director of CRID stated that “NCI is the top of the line of all captioning entities, and we are thrilled to offer students advanced real-time training coupled with the opportunity to explore real-time captioning as a career choice. A partnership between the largest captioning firm in the U.S. and the finest court reporting college in the U.S. is a unique and very valuable opportunity. We are very pleased to be able to work in concert with NCI to develop highly qualified candidates for their real-time captioning service.”

The Court Reporting Institute of Dallas was founded in 1978 and is now the largest court reporting college in America. In 1983 CRID became the first private college in Texas to offer an Associate of Applied Science in Court Reporting. CRID is accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools. The college occupies approximately 30,000 square feet in Dallas’ Twin Towers office complex, and includes large classrooms, a courtroom for mock trials, and extensive computer and training facilities.

With offices in metropolitan Washington, DC; Burbank, CA; New York, NY; Dallas, TX; and London, England, the nonprofit National Captioning Institute is the global captioning leader, supplying the highest quality captioning and subtitling services to the television and home video industries.

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SIDE BAR: How do real-time captioners keep up?
Using a modified court-reporting steno machine connected to a computer, real-time captioners can create captions at speeds of over 225 words per minute. The computer contains software that translates stenographic shorthand into words in caption formats with standard spelling. The captions are sent over telephone lines to the television network where they are automatically added to the television signal and can then be seen by the captioned TV audience two to three seconds after the words are spoken.

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