International Captioning Project
Electronic Newsroom
Captioning
In North America and some European countries, another method is used primarily for local newscasts, and relies on an interface between a newsroom computer network (often referred to as an electronic newsroom) and the encoding device. Electronic newsroom captioning has been shown to be cost-effective and less labor-intensive than real-time captioning, though incapable of captioning material which is unscripted or not entered into the newsroom's computer system before broadcast.
Prior to air, all available script is typed into a network of computersÑ the electronic newsroom. As the prompter operator advances the script on the prompter monitor, s/he also controls the transmission of the script to the encoding device, which operates as described above for stenographic captioning. However, there are two problems inherent in electronic newsroom captioning: 1) audio that is not pre-scripted cannot be captioned, such as live reports or last- minute additions, and 2) the optimum display speed for prompted script is often too fast for caption display. Despite these conflicts, electronic newsroom captioning is used widely because it offers the least expensive way to caption newscasts.
While stenographic theories are available in many languages other than English (including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Korean, Russian, Arabic and German), they are not currently used for real-time captioning. There are two basic reasons for this: either the technology does not yet exist in to apply these theories for broadcast use, or because the complexities of the languages themselves pose stenographic problems which have not been solved.
