The pain of Sept. 11 hit Kathy DiLorenzo somewhere in the middle. Not as debilitatingly as it did a victim's family, yet not as vaguely as it might someone watching on a satellite feed.

As a pioneering, real-time captioner, the Moon woman, working for NBC News, was handling text that the hearing impaired and others would read at the bottom of their television screens. As the tragedy unfolded, the words affixed to the unspeakable pictures afforded her a stark, ground-level view.

Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette
Kathy DiLorenzo, new president of the National Court Reporters Association, in front of the DiLorenzo/Weber Broadcast Captioning Studio commemorative sculpture that hangs in the captioning lab at the Community College of Allegheny County Allegheny campus library.
Click photo for larger image.

Close enough to the real thing, she said. Too close.

"I walked into the office in Canonsburg an hour after the first plane hit," she said. "All captioners came to the aid of TV. We were on the air three days running, an hour at a time."

It wasn't an accident that Ms. DiLorenzo was on the front lines Sept. 11, because she is considered one of the best in a relatively new niche of the court-reporting profession.

Her contributions to that growth were recognized in August when she was named president of the National Court Reporters Association. NCRA comprises 26,000 captioners, official court reporters and freelance reporters who cover legal, business, government and educational proceedings, not to mention the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards and the Olympics.

Then there are the hockey games. The 25-year veteran allows that they're a captioner's minefield. All those foreign names, she groans.

Thrilled by her honor, Ms. DiLorenzo said, "Court reporting is a dynamic, evolving profession, and I think it is important that career-seekers become increasingly well-informed about the field."

When she broke into it in 1981, the role of a court reporter was much closer to what you saw in the courtroom TV shows: a bespectacled woman perched behind a stenotype machine with an ever-sharp pencil stuck sideways in her mouth.

But five years later, the field had expanded to include TV captioning services, and Ms. DiLorenzo was one of the first to seize the opportunity. She's now vice president of national reporter relations for Merrill Corp., the St. Paul, Minn.-based parent of VITAC, a worldwide leader in captioning and subtitling services. VITAC's corporate offices are on Hillpointe Drive in Canonsburg.

"In '86, the field of captioning was brand new. I didn't even know about it until another court reporter told me about it. There were, like, 12 of us in the nation," she said, "so it was kind of by default that I was put in a leadership position."

At the Community College of Allegheny County, longtime associate Mary Beth Johnson begs to differ.

In 2002, CCAC dedicated a captioning lab in her friend's honor. A cast mold of Ms. DiLorenzo hangs on the wall of the lab, which is in the Allegheny Campus's (North Side) library.

"I've known her for over 15 years," court reporting professor Ms. Johnson said. "She's been a great mentor to CCAC and to a generation of captioning students.

"Back in the day, she was one of the first real-time writers," Ms. Johnson said, drawing a distinction between the skills required for a traditional court reporter and a real-time specialist such as Ms. DiLorenzo.

There is little room for error, she said, likening the task to "writing naked, because a million people are reading your words. You can't make a mistake."

Mistakes do happen when you're expected to handle 250-plus words a minute, which is why the students' best friend is the Home Shopping Network, caption-friendly because it's slow-moving and repetitive.

Then there are the world-class bloopers inherent in working with foreign cultures.

"If [the report said] 'Bush got away with the whole enchilada,' someone would put in sandwich. It kind of loses something in translation," Ms. Johnson said with a laugh.

The handling of sandwiches and Slovakian goalie names aside, she calls Ms. DiLorenzo "the best of the best."

"She's a person who was not only extremely talented, but she gives back to the students. She's a superstar."

First Published: January 4, 2007, 5:00 a.m.