STENOGRAPHER TO TAKE THE NOTES AND RUN

By Richard Woodbury

For 23 years, Denver court reporter Paul Zuckerman has labored in obscurity. But starting this week, he'll be taking notes on the national stage. Judge Richard Matsch has picked Zuckerman to be the sole stenographer on the Oklahoma City bombing trial, which begins jury selection this week and could generate 6,000 pages of transcript each month for upwards of five months. Zuckerman plans to cash in on the arrangement by selling copies of the transcript to the press--and anyone else who's interested--for $1 a page, a fee set by the federal courts. To get more exposure, he has also inked a contract with PubNETics, a Denver software company that will post his output on the World Wide Web. The subscription-only service has already signed up a dozen customers for the full trial, and expects several dozen more occasional users to stop by each month. All told, Zuckerman could generate several hundred thousand dollars of extra, and perfectly legal, income. "He'll earn every cent of it," says fellow court reporter Eileen Hyatt. "During the trial, he will have no life of his own. And even a comma in the wrong place can come back on him."

--By Richard Woodbury