Click through to see the chart…

Change in average food prices in Canada

The latest data available show food prices for each October for 2007-2011. So, I calculated percent change for the past year, and the past four years. Because the x-axis is so far down, I popped on a couple of the 1-year numbers to make it more clear.

Source: Statistics Canada, as of Dec. 3 2011

And income?

For most people, are not growing at the same pace. For example, in B.C. the average hourly wages went up 2.3% in the past year (not adjusted for inflation).

Some groups did much better: managers’ wages on average went up 7%, certain industries saw wages go up 12%. Others did worse: young workers (15-24) saw their average hourly wages decrease.

Some people also grow food to give to those in need.

This generally happens in December. It always makes me think of a day in November. In 2004, to be precise.

I was working as CBC Radio’s reporter in Nelson, and our assignment desk was expecting the annual report on child poverty in our province. So, I was asked to go talk to a family, with children, who were struggling.

An articulate and brave single working mom with a young son agreed to talk to me on the radio. She invited me into her apartment while she made dinner for the boy; I remember her stirring yoghurt into some organic macaroni and cheese to add a little more protein for him. She told me she got help from the food bank, at times, and healthy protein was hard to afford.

It’s not a dramatic story, but I think of them every time we talk about food banks. About one in three people who rely on food banks in B.C. is a child.

Food prices are on the rise too. That’s something we all sense in our grocery bills, but it’s really striking when you look at the numbers, especially for staples.

Here are changes in food prices, from Oct. 2010 to Oct. 2011:

• Potatoes – up 24%
• Carrots – up 20%
• Coffee – up 19&
• Flour – up 17%
• Eggs – up 13%

[Data from Statistics Canada, calculation by me.]

I did that story seven years ago and child poverty in B.C. is still on the rise, and the worst in Canada. We did the story again this past November. And next year?

I have to stress, a scientific background is not necessary — anyone can ask the same kinds of questions. But, for me, the muscles I exercised in science help. I imagine it would be similar for someone with a background in economics or the law, who can skip a couple of steps en route to finding interesting information in those fields.

Meltdown in the media

Still from an animated graphic showing 'exposed' fuel rods. (CBC)

I remember waking up to a news that the nuclear fuel rods were “exposed” and in danger of melting down. I was tasked that day with explaining to our audience, an ocean away, what that meant.

Step one: what does “exposed” mean? Many of the early reports were not explaining that bit, leaving the audience to wonder whether the nuclear fuel was exposed to the outside world—meaning the reactor was totally compromised. So what was happening?

The officials were slow to release information, the aerial shots were not clear, and I had no idea what the inside of a nuclear reactor looked like (despite growing up in nuclear towns).

So, I needed the help of people who know about nuclear reactors, would pick up their phone, and be willing to talk to me. Happily, I found two: one at UBC’s TRIUMF laboratory, and one a former neighbour (and nuclear engineer) at the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State.

They explained that “exposed” meant the water that is supposed to be covering and cooling the rods inside the reactor was boiling off. Unless they could be cooled, the rods could create so much heat they’d melt the metal holding them apart, and fall, and keep getting hotter. A complete meltdown was possible, but considered unlikely. The impact of a meltdown would be mostly local; the fuel would literally be melting out of the reactor onto that site. Very different than an explosion.

The situation was not good. But it also wasn’t yet as dire as it had sounded. The rods were still inside the reactor, the reactor’s containment vessel was still in place, but possibly leaking. We created graphics to show our audience what was going on.

Here are videos with my stories from that week (March 14 | March 15). If you prefer text, here’s a good explainer from Richard Black, the BBC’s smart Environment Correspondent.

Numbers in context

Putting radiation levels in some kind of familiar context. (CBC)

These risks are unfamiliar, which tends to make them more scary. The challenge is to put them in context.

I compared the radiation exposure at the plant to things people are more familiar with. I dug up charts and checked them with experts, and found that the radiation had been very high, but fell to a level between a chest X-ray and CT scan. (Note, I mispronounced millisieverts.)

None of these “digging” examples are particularly sexy, or investigative exposés. In fact, as I learned more, the story became less sensational, but more true. And I think our audience has an appetite for that.

A behind-the-scenes look at the talk I'll take to class

Here’s a sneak peek at the Prezi I made for the talk.

It’s not that rare to be a reporter with a background in science; we have a few in our local newsroom. But it’s still uncommon enough that when people I encounter on the job learn I studied biology, they’re surprised.

Many ask whether it was my plan all along to learn about science, then report on it. (Not at all —I really thought I was going to be a biologist).

And, I often hear, “Oh that must really help you on scientific stories.” (Absolutely! But not in the way you might think.)

Bring on the data!

The fact is, the facts I learned don’t help me much. Even if I remembered every nephron and neuron I scribbled down in a final exam, my information is more than a decade out of date.

What’s important about what I learned is it gives me the faith that even complex things can be understood, and it’s my job to make sense of them, and use that information to critically evaluate what people tell me.

A three-spined stickleback. Image from Dolph Schluter's lab, where I once measured fish tails.

Being unafraid of numbers and spreadsheets is good too. I learned Excel spending many hours volunteering in a lab measuring millimetres of stickleback tails. Now on the job, I use a spreadsheet at least once a week to sort data and make calculations.

How do you know that?

The focus of my talk is evaluating sources of information. Scientists and journalists work in very different ways — it’s always fun to shock first-year students with the kind of deadlines I operate under — but we both have to think critically about the evidence a claim is based on.

I’ll be encouraging the students to ask: “How do you know that?” Should be fun.

Ready to go on air in Sparwood, B.C. (Dan Rodenbush)

Look at the title: “Is TV News Journalism Salvageable?” It presumes a thing broken, that may or may not be rescued from the alley before the garbage truck comes.

But, I went, because I find it a luxury to step back from the daily panic of doing, and talk about doing better. Maybe there would be talk instead of sanding and refinishing, or a fresh coat of paint.

One new path

Kai Nagata was headlining, with a critique of TV news, and why he quit his job when he felt more like part of the problem than the solution. He’s a very engaging speaker, but I bristled when he took some cheap shots, mocking CBC News and CTV’s Investigators (one of whom was in the audience) for having flashy graphics. As I said on Twitter, if you’re going to criticize TV news, don’t start by dogging new investment in enterprise and original storytelling (something CBC is also putting more local resources into).

Still, he made solid points analyzing one of his own previous stories, describing how he hadn’t the time or freedom in that job to do the journalism he wanted.

So, he’s now sleeping in a tent in his parent’s backyard, working on a solution—networking online and across the country to talk about new models of production and distribution. And let me be clear: I don’t take umbrage with that, or with anyone taking risks to tell stories they care about.

Is that it?

But the discussion that followed left me disappointed, because it turned so cynical, despite the smart people assembled on stage. [It would have helped if there was someone who currently works in TV news participating; the organizers had tried to find someone but were not able to.]

There was acknowledgement from a couple of panelists that there are some good people in TV “working their guts out” to tell important stories. But little talk about how to get more of that.

Instead, we heard blanket criticisms of the industry, repeated references to “cat up a tree” stories, and the crowd applauded the panelist who thought TV news should die. It felt more like a discussion called, “Is TV News something we can roll our eyes at and dismiss?”

Now, take this all with a grain of salt; I work in TV news. I’m not saying it’s perfect, nor am I in a position to critique or defend the industry or my employer. But at the very least, if you’re going to host a discussion called, “Is TV News Journalism Salvageable?” surely there’s a more interesting and intellectually challenging answer than “no.”

I have some ideas I’m working on, to loosen some of the logistical shackles on my own televised journalism. More on that later, I hope.

Maybe you have ideas too. What do you think would improve television news? Tell a reporter what you think would make it better. Genuine suggestions, not sneering please.

• Acid Oceans: The other climate change problem
• Saving Sharks: Connecting the Asian fin trade to Canadian waters
• Branding Nature: Selling and saving the seas

Basking sharks have huge mouths, the better to filter plankton with. (Chris Gotschalk/DFO)

But I didn’t have a context for why overfishing sharks would be any different than other types of overfishing. I also wasn’t sure whether this was something that affected sharks off Canada’s Pacific coast, or if it was only a problem other places.

It turns out, yes, overfishing sharks is different, and yes, the fin trade around the world affects endangered sharks here. I connect the dots with the help of patient scientists, to tell a tale about endangered basking sharks. That piece also aired across Canada on CBC Radio.

The second International Marine Conservation Congress starts in Victoria today. Scientists, policy makers, resource managers, and NGOs are here to share science on our changing oceans, and ideas on how to save them. It’s only been held once before, 2 years ago in Washington, D.C. What I find so interesting is the goal is not just moving the conversation forward by publishing papers in the scientific literature — but also by crafting recommendations that let science inform public policy.

I’m here to report for CBC Radio — you’ll hear me talking to Stephen Quinn, host of On the Coast, and Grant Lawrence, guest-hosting All Points West. I’ll be on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at about 5:40 or so in the Vancouver area and 4:50-ish in the rest of B.C.

Changing oceans

It’s not easy to decide what to cover. The program is huge, covering invasive species, overfishing, aquaculture, planning, and many more issues. I’ll be looking for stories that mean something to a B.C. audience.

One piece will be on climate change and ocean acidification — there is a lot on it at this conference, and a topic I find really interesting. We know the pH of the ocean is changing as it absorbs excess CO2 we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It seems to already be causing problems for the shellfish industry in some coastal areas. But it’s not clear just how the complex systems of the sea will respond to these changes — or how this threat stacks up against others.

Still deciding on other topics. I’m excited—and a little bit daunted—to dive in.

* update: This may or may not be an internet myth based on a band name. I was just chatting with a journalist publishing a book on sharks, and she’d never heard it. Nevertheless, a lovely word.

Another kind of feed, from the animal kingdom (Photo by tomsowerby on flickr)

But here’s a path I wonder about sometimes, that Darren just reminded me of by mentioning “churnalism” — a derogatory term for practice of rewriting press releases and calling it news.

To be clear, I’m not saying I hope this is where we’re heading, I’m musing out loud about something I find partly ominous. I also see it as a possibility if certain existing traits of the current news environment thrive and outcompete others.

Follow your own news

What if mainstream media organizations gave up on covering anything that came written well in a press release? As in, if there’s enough in the release that “churnalism” could be practiced, it just isn’t.

The public would still get the information that’s available from the big institutional sources of news by signing up to those institution’s feeds. Instead of reporters tasked with checking whether there’s anything new from the Delta Police or Vancouver Coastal Health, the people who want to know what those bodies have to say pull the information in themselves. Aggregators would emerge (probably from the news media and elsewhere) to curate feeds for people who aren’t interested in doing that themselves.

This is something we already see, a bit. Celebrities talking directly to fans via social media to bypass critical coverage. PR people with more followers than the reporters they pitch.

What, role, then, would journalists play? One possible path (and my hope, in this thought-experiment) is that by curbing time spent on these easy tasks, newsrooms running at full-tilt would have more time to do the hard stuff, like finding more stories someone hasn’t already told, or more thorough information to tell them better.

It’s like that often-retold tale about the jar with sand and rocks, meant to remind us that if you fill your days with little things there’s no room for the big priorities. This would be a switch to more rocks, less sand. I’m happy to say I’m seeing some shift in this direction at CBC right now.

The other possibility is newsrooms would just keep shrinking, and more former reporters would go work for the feeds.

Okay, there’s one dodgy idea. I wonder what cool experiments might already be underway, when it comes to picking battles. Where do you think the news is going?

Who was being quoted on the health risk of BSE in Canadian beef in Canada's national newspapers, May 21-Aug. 13, 2003. Coverage continued for months but scientists stopped getting quoted. The y-axis is the proportion (%) of sources in each category quoted in each time period. (Johnson, 2004)

My thesis was on risk communication, using mad cow disease as a case study. I looked at a the language and sources used in news articles to discuss the safety of Canadian beef after Canada’s first mad cow was found in May 2003.

I remember that day vividly. It was my first summer at CBC, and I was interning at Quirks & Quarks in Toronto.

Then-prime minister Jean Chretien, in an AP photo from May 21, 2003, the day after the news broke. The original caption read: "Jean Chretien shows that Canadian beef is safe by eating it for lunch on Wednesday." (AP)

As the summer progressed, BSE remained a major national story, mostly because the U.S. had banned Canadian beef, leaving cattle producers without a major source of income. There was a huge SARS benefit concert in Toronto that summer, but I remember dubbing it “Beef-stock” because of the amount of Canadian beef promotion, including a city block-long aisle of BBQ. I wrote about it at the time:

Veteran comedians Dan Ackroyd and Catherine O’Hara weren’t even trying to be funny when they sat down between acts to eat Ontario and Alberta beef in front of the crowd of half a million spectators. ‘Mmmm, this is great Canadian beef,’ Ackroyd said between bites. ‘I just can’t decide which type of great Canadian beef I like better!’

Trust us, we have science

What does this all have to do with risk communication or my Masters work?

Well, I’d noticed that, as the story progressed, people were still talking about science and health risk, but they were no longer talking to scientists about it. Politicians, cattle producers, and yes, celebrities had taken the media stage to promote Canadian beef.

So I decided to look at whether that gut feeling had any backing to it, with a content analysis of the mad cow coverage in the two national newspapers, the Globe and Mail and National Post. I tracked a few things, including what each story was about, who was quoted making claims about health risk, and whether those claims had any caveat of uncertainty. (They should have, because a lot was unknown about the disease or how prevalent it was on Canadian farms).

The story shifted over time, understandably, from the question of risk to the general public (very low) to one of political and economic impact. But those politicians and industry groups were still making claims about science and health risk, with little mention of uncertainty. Here’s a representative quote from the then-minister of health, Anne McLellan:

“I think we have the science now to make a scientific case for the Americans to lift the importation ban.”

So what? Well, at the time I was trying to make a point about risk communication, and, of course, finish my degree.

Here’s what I get out of it now. There’s nothing wrong with politicians and lobby groups talking about science — let’s hope they’re using some evidence to make decisions.

But, science is a process, not an outcome. And it’s a process that gains credibility (and power) by laying out uncertainties and the evidence to support its conclusions. In this kind of rhetoric, speakers end up using the word “science” to borrow that credibility without earning it by doing either of those things.

A researcher implants an acoustic tag into a migrating Fraser River sockeye (Jennifer M. Burt/Science)

Q: When is the lead author of a paper published in Science not allowed to comment on the subject?

A: When she works for Canada’s federal government. In this case, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).

It is not a new phenomenon that Canada’s federal scientists are prevented from talking about their taxpayer-funded work. Margaret Munro, the science reporter for Postmedia News, wrote a news story last year that pushed this practice into the public eye, prompting coverage by other media outlets (including the CBC), and an opinion piece in the journal Nature calling for change. From Munro’s story:

The documents say the “new” rules went into force in March and reveal how they apply to not only to contentious issues including the oilsands, but benign subjects such as floods that occurred 13,000 years ago.

But, even if it’s not new, I still think its worth noting when it happens.

In this case, the scientist was the first author of study on Fraser River sockeye that provides a new piece to the puzzle of their declining numbers. (CBC story.) Researchers took tissue samples from migrating sockeye salmon, and tagged the fish to see which ones survived to spawn. They found a pattern.

The ones with a certain set of active genes were more likely to die before the spawning grounds. The researchers said it looked like the genes were responding to a viral infection — as in the fish that were dying had caught a virus out at sea.

The journal’s embargoed release sent to media around the world told reporters to contact DFO communications to reach the lead and corresponding author, Kristina Miller. But after days of trying, my colleague on the story was told yesterday that Miller “still [had] not received permission from Ottawa to speak to the press.”

Two of her co-authors from UBC, Scott Hinch and Tony Farrell, conducted interviews instead.

This study does touch on a few issues the federal government would flag as controversial. For example, if the fish did catch a virus, where did it come from? Biologist and activist Alexandra Morton suggests it might be from fish farms. Also, the study invites questions about climate change, pointing out that “seven of the last 10 summers have been the warmest on record for the Fraser River” and explaining that warmer water can make sick fish sicker.

What do you think? Would you like to hear from federal scientists about their work?