A young killer whale found dead at Point No Point, near Victoria. (Stefan Beckmann/DFO)
Answer 1: Life’s tough, and more to the point, finite. So, animals die, even the charismatic ones that humans like. That’s Nature.
Answer 2: Some thing, or things, are happening in the ocean, and these are signs of that.
I don’t know what the answer is, but there have been a lot of stories lately about marine mammals washing up dead on B.C. beaches.
Lisa talks with her hands about why she uses social media on the job. (Photo credit: Miss604 on flickr)
This weekend at the Northern Voice conference, Kirk LaPointe from The Vancouver Sun and I spoke on a panel called “How (Should) Journalists Use Social Media.”
The visuals I used, created using a new-to-me online tool called Prezi, are posted online here.
I won’t recount the whole thing, but here’s a couple of key ideas I talked about.
Help available here! (Photo by cogdogblog on flickr)
Well, mostly just improved.
I had been getting pretty frustrated with some pieces of this site that weren’t working. There had never been an RSS feed, the comment form was broken, and so on.
So, I hit up the very friendly people at the WordPress help desk at Northern Voice this weekend. Not only was the help free, but it was nice. No judging when I introduced the problem to each subsequent person as:
Sorry, I built the site myself, so it’s probably not done right, and I probably can’t tell you how I did it….
I’m going to be speaking at the Northern Voice conference this weekend, joining Kirk LaPointe from the Vancouver Sun on a panel called “How (Should) Journalists Use Social Media”.
One of the tricky things in trying to prepare my presentation is that the subject matter is my job, but this is supposed a “Personal Blogging and Social Media Conference” — something the conference organizers reminded speakers about, oh, five or six times.
So, what to do?
Scientists are tagging humboldt squid to figure out what they're doing in the North Pacific. (Submitted by Nikki Lane to CBC)
Even more interesting, or perhaps alarming, is what’s happening with the Humboldt squid in B.C. waters.
First, why are they here? They’re native to northern Mexico, but in the past ten years have spread northward, first to California, and now all the way to southeast Alaska. That is a big change in such a short time.
Secondly, they’re washing up dead on beaches in large numbers.
Killer whales on the B.C. coast. (CBC)
Researching another story this week on humpbacks, I called up Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard at the Vancouver Aquarium. He’s a scientist with a gift for speaking clearly, and he studies marine mammals on our coast. He’s also the co-chair of the Killer Whale Recovery Team organized by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
I asked him about the killer whales he studies — the Northern Resident population, which can be seen in the Johnstone Strait area and further north during the summer. Last year, he had spoken out about that population starving, and described whales swimming for hours before finding fish to eat. (Their preferred food: chinook salmon).
This year, what a difference.
A humpback whale breaches off the B.C. coast. Photo by SparkyLeigh on flickr.
The good news is: seeing a humpback whale in the North Pacific isn’t as rare anymore.
They’re considered threatened in Canada, and for as long as the U.S. has had an endangered species list (since 1973) the humpback has been on it.
But that could soon change, in the U.S. at least.
Reaching for plain soap is the best way to wash hands and avoid spreading disease, says Dr. Henry. (CBC)
Dr. Henry just published a book on preventing disease spread, called Soap and Water & Common Sense, and has been on the front lines of media-messaging around the swine flu virus.
The piece of advice that’s yielded the most discussion online, and in our newsroom, is about avoiding antibacterial soaps with ingredients like triclosan. As Dr. Henry noted, they can lead to drug-resistant strains, and do nothing against viruses like the flu.
I’ve been wrestling with my point of view in the ongoing discussions about new/social vs. old/legacy/traditional media.
On one hand, you could call me a new media keener. At least, among my colleagues in the newsroom and my cohort of friends, I’ve been an early adopter of tools like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.
On the other, I feel the need to defend the traditional media. Not just because it pays my bills. But because I think the things we can (but don’t always) do well have been unduly dismissed.
I did a story for CBC News in Vancouver today that’s already getting a bunch of comments on our site. It’s about phone books being delivered that aren’t wanted, and what companies are doing about it.
Not one but two thick business directories arrived on Vancouver doorstops a few weeks ago. I didn’t think much more about them until I saw Darren Barefoot’s post about putting the new books straight into the recycling bin.
Others have also been griping about it too. Jonathon Narvey blogged about it and last year started a group on Facebook called The Yellow Pages Must be Stopped. His concern, as he said in my story:
I understand they are recyclable and I understand they’re made from recycled products, but the energy that goes into making a product that very few people want just seems to me a huge waste of resources.”
So what do the companies say? Continue reading →
