NEWSrelease

News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.

Date: June 4, 2003

Contact: Jay Feinberg

703-917-7600 (V/TTY)

703-917-9853 (FAX)

jfeinberg@ncicap.org

Democracy Now! Announces Partnership With National Captioning Institute To Provide Closed Captioning Service

Grassroots News Show Continues Its Commitment To Being Accessible To Diverse Audiences

Washington, DC – The National Captioning Institute (NCI) and Democracy Now! announce the addition of real-time closed captioning to their daily news broadcast. The service is provided by Democracy Now! in collaboration with the Virginia based, National Captioning Institute (NCI). As with much of the continued growth of Democracy Now! this marks another first for community-based media.

Amy Goodman, the show’s host stated, “Democracy Now is committed to making news accessible to the widest range of viewers and listeners. Closed captioning is our latest effort to ensure that everyone is able to watch and educate themselves about what is really going on in our world today.”

The National Captioning Institute (NCI) was awarded the contract to provide closed captioning services to the national award-winning news program after the Department of Education committed to funding 50% of the captioning via a closed captioning accessibility grant; the rest will be funded by the show. Closed captioning benefits 28 million deaf or hard of hearing people in the United States plus millions of others by providing visual access to the wide range of information and entertainment on television.

“NCI is excited to partner with Democracy Now! to provide real-time captions for its educational news programming,” stated Jack Gates, NCI President and CEO. “This partnership will enable the network to make its programming accessible to millions of people who are deaf or hard of hearing.”

Democracy Now! is a national, listener-sponsored public radio and TV news hour, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the country. The program airs daily on over 140 stations including Pacifica radio stations, Pacifica and NPR affiliates, public access TV stations, Free Speech TV (Dish Network Channel 9415), Shortwave Radio (Radio for Peace International) and on the Internet at democracynow.org.

With offices in the Washington, DC metropolitan area; Burbank, CA; New York, NY; Dallas, TX; and London, England, the nonprofit National Captioning Institute is the global captioning leader, supplying the highest-quality closed captioning and related services for broadcast and cable television, home video and DVD, and government and corporate video programming.

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Editor’s note: Closed captioning of a wide range of news and public information programming, including Democracy Now!, is made possible in part by a grant of $1.4 million over four years from the U.S. Department of Education. These grant funds cover 50% of the captioning costs, with private sector funding coveringthe other 50%.

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