From the courthouse to TV studios, court reporters, deposition reporters, and broadcast captioners are in demand! From a local courthouse to the floor of the United States Senate; from a high-rise office building to a home office in a basement, careers in the reporting profession offer many diverse and unique professional opportunities for the right individuals.

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, CART providers, webcasters, scopists, and realtime transcriptionists. 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.

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.

A career in reporting or captioning offers:

• Full-time salaries that are solidly above the U.S. median.  Information “court” reporters average over $60,000 a year.
• Flexible hours, often working from home
• A high demand for all areas of the reporting profession
• An associate’s degree and certificate of competency that can be achieved in two-four years.

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.  If you posses the skills and drive to become a reporter or captioner, then the high-tech filed of reporting might be for you.  This is a career that offers flexibility, good pay, and a chance to give back to your community by providing essential services.