Costs of stenographic captioning There are two kinds of costs- equipment and personnel. Equipment can run from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands. Either the station or the stenocaptioner will need steno equipment and a computerized dictionary for converting steno into English. The station will also need to buy caption encoding equipment which converts English words into data ready for broadcast. Stenocaptioners are well paid professionals with years of training in steno.
Few people have such highly specialized skills.
Once a stenocaptioner is hired, that person trains several more months, and then spends several hours daily preparing for each broadcast. These are computer networks into which reporters type their news stories before each newscast. Anchors and reporters read these scripts from monitors during the newscast. These scripts can also be broadcast as captions if the electronic newsroom is equipped with special equipment and software for captioning. A drawback to this system is that any stories that are not typed into the computer before airtime will not be captioned, such as live reports, interviews, and weather reports.