Internship

My internship at Realtime Reporters consisted of three major parts, scoping and proofreading transcripts, and creating a style manual.

Proofreading transcripts is not something I do as a reporter in my daily job, so this internship provided me with an experience which was very insightful and rewarding. You may be wondering why I don’t proofread my own transcripts. That’s easy to answer. I believe after you have reported a job, and then scoped a job, you become blind to many mistakes. That is why having a separate proofreader is essential to producing an accurate transcript.

I spent a lot of my time during my internship proofreading and scoping transcripts for finalization by the reporter. By proofing a transcript, I looked for any errors a reporter may have made during transcription. What is interesting to note, correcting a transcript and making it readable can often be challenging as many people do not talk in a grammatically correct way. Transcripts are verbatim records of what people said, and they have to be punctuated in a way to accurately convey the meaning of what was said. Proofreading the transcripts not only helped me to develop my own skills as a reporter, but it also taught me many things as I was reading which included new terminology, ways to do things in the transcripts, and the value of having someone else look closely at your work before sending it off to an attorney.

In addition to proofreading transcripts, I scoped transcripts for other reporters. What is meant by scoping is you listen to a room recording of the audio of a proceeding, and you compare it to the written words produced by the reporter. This is different from proofreading because you are making sure that every word spoken is recorded on paper. This is an important step in the production of a transcript because it is not uncommon to miss or drop words when reporting because of certain circumstances which may include multiple people speaking at once, someone speaking really fast, or the reporter may have misunderstood or wrote the wrong word. By listening to the actual room recording and comparing it to the written words, this process cleans up the transcript and puts it in a form for which is ready for the proofreading stage of production.

Working on the style manual was another part of my internship. Reporters often do things in transcripts different ways; for example, marking exhibits, setting up a witness, or creating their index page. While there is no right or wrong way to do these things, Realtime Reporters wanted to create a standardized method for their reporters. The manual I created sets out specific details for the reporters to reference, and thereby creates a uniform transcript produced by Realtime Reporters no matter which reporter took the job. This is helpful because oftentimes there will be many jobs in one case, and there may be different reporters on each job. By using the style manual, the reporters can submit their transcripts for production. When Realtime Reporters provides the transcripts to the attorneys, no matter which reporter was working, the transcript will look the same. To learn more about the style manual, please refer to the page on this website where you can view the manual.