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.

I’ve certainly reported on a few for CBC News. For example:

• The Department of Fisheries and Oceans told me yesterday they’re “concerned, but not panicking” about at least eight harbour porpoises that have washed up dead in recent days on southern Vancouver Island. Maybe they were hunted to exhaustion by transient killer whales, or the weaker ones died during breeding season, or something else. The provincial government’s Animal Health Centre in Abbotsford is conducting necropsies starting today. [Update: now, at least nine porpoises have washed up in five days.]
• A brand new killer whale calf just washed up near Victoria. Again, the cause of death is not known, and the Animal Health Centre is investigating. Here’s my story interviewing the veterinary pathologist on the case. Survival is low among newborn killer whales, so the death itself isn’t surprising, but some populations of them are so endangered this death was treated (a) as an urgent case and (b) as an opportunity to learn more about what’s going on.
• There have also been at least five grey whales washing up north and south of the border (CBC) (The Province). This is apparently not unusual; it happened at the time when grey whales pass here on the way from their breeding grounds in Baja to their feeding grounds in B.C./Alaska.

Does this all add up to anything? I don’t know. Just because they’re all marine mammals doesn’t mean it’s wise to list these cases together. Plus, the media has a habit of paying extra attention to something its already paid attention to (meaning the later strandings would get more coverage).

The good thing is: it appears that someone’s watching. When I interviewed Dr. Stephen Raverty, the veterinary pathologist on these cases, he noted that prior to 2000 most marine mammal strandings were not investigated. Now, he says 70-80% are, thanks to the efforts of DFO and NOAA. His lab now examines hundreds of marine mammal carcasses each year.

The hope is, if something is going on, these individual cases will yield some clues to protect the rest of the population.

Do you have any questions or thoughts about what’s going on?

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.

Social media makes my city smaller

My city, but smaller and more interesting. (Photo credit: ecstaticist on flickr)

Smaller, more interesting, perhaps even more friendly.

In my talk, I told a story about my first job at CBC: a short-term stint as CBC Radio’s Nelson bureau reporter. There, it was a lot easier for the public to reach me, if they wanted to. No security desk, no switchboard in Toronto, just a one-room office and the phone number was in the book.

In a big city newsroom like CBC Vancouver, it’s very different. It would be easy (though not smart) to avoid “the audience” almost completely. In my opinion, good journalists don’t — with or without social media. I use tools like Twitter to reach out beyond the people I would otherwise know, to get to know my city better. My networks are bigger, and that makes my city smaller.

Social media as “social scanner”

So, if you see something on Twitter, do you go report it on air? No, of course not.

It’s like a police scanner to me. People who work in news sometimes listen to chatter on the police scanner to find out what’s happening. A fire in Coquitlam. A fatal MVA in Abbotsford. Just because you hear it, doesn’t mean you immediately go on air with it. You need to find out more. But now you know what to find out about.

That’s how I use Twitter, and other social media tools. If I see a tweet about something that could be breaking news (like the injuries at the Alexisonfire concert in Vancouver during the Olympics) then I start asking questions, and searching for more.

Stream vs. reservoir

Other reporters, or people starting to use Twitter on the job sometimes ask me how I keep up with my followers. And the answer is, I don’t.

For me, email : reservoir :: twitter : stream.

The water in the reservoir of a dam is contained and accounted for — stored until it’s eventually released through the turbines, or out some overflow. That’s email to me: I have an obligation to deal with what’s sent to me.

For me, Twitter and blogs and Facebook are streams I dip in and out of. I enjoy them while I’m there, but I don’t feel beholden to track every drop of water that flowed before and after my visit. Nor do I expect that of others.

How do you think journalists should use social media?

Thanks to notes from DameEmma, Stephen Hui, ivantohelpyou, shamelesshussy, Miss604, Gillian Shaw, Rob McMahon, di_marshall and Hummingbird604 for helping me decide what to repeat here.

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….

Miss604 gave the first crack at it, with some tips on plugins that might work better for me. Then Digital Entomologist Lloyd Budd took it on for hours, looking for where I hid a wee bit of code that he figured was messing things up. He eventually did, with a little help from Scott Leslie, and now the feed works.

Thanks all! I also learned a lesson: plopping code somewhere to make the site look prettier just might be breaking 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?

Well, quite a few people are talking about their jobs, actually. Take uber-science communicator David Ng for example. Science is his work, but it looks like his Northern Voice talk will be a human take on the world he works in, and a project he’s passionate about.

And that’s what I’ll be aiming for. Using social media as a journalist is guided for me by personal interest and my own judgement of where lines are that shouldn’t be crossed, not just by CBC corporate policy. [See below for more discussion of this point]

If you’re at Northern Voice, maybe you’ll check it out. Or, just say hi in the atrium.

Update: We discussed this a bit in my talk, and I’d like to add in text here what I said there. I am mindful of CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices, and know I could be called on by my bosses to defend anything I write online. But the official rules haven’t kept up with the changing technology and ways of working, so I have to use my own judgement to decide how to apply them to new situations. And, I use social media because I want to, not because I’m told to.

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.

Given this, I was pretty curious when I learned about a new study tagging two dozen Humboldt squid and trying to trace their movements around the North Pacific, as part of the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking project. The goal is to figure out what the jumbo squid are doing up here. That’s important to know for fisheries because these squid prey on commercially valuable species like hake. It also matters because their rapid change of range could tell us something about our changing oceans.

You can watch my CBC TV story (vid link) from last week to see the squid, and hear from the scientist leading the research. There’s an online text version here.

eyes on the ground

If you look at the TV story, or even the photo above, you’ll see that CBC didn’t capture the images of the squid. The video came from a Tofino-based group called the Raincoast Education Society.

I found some of it on YouTube, then called up Josie Osborne and asked if we could use it. She said yes, and ended up being part of the story, talking about the wonder and concern people felt as squid washed on shore — squid that aren’t supposed to be up here.

What I said to her then (besides “thank you”) was how important it is for groups like hers to capture video like this, and post it online. They can be the eyes and ears of a changing coastline that many of us don’t get to visit. (Pacific Wild on the central coast is another great example.) And while, as a reporter, I have to be cautious of second-hand video, it can also help me tell a story that otherwise wouldn’t get told.

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.

The central coast runs for chinook were abundant, he told me. So the whales seemed to have enough to eat, and it could be seen in how they act.

“That basically means the whales don’t have to be making a living every minute of the day they have time to socialize,” said Barrett-Lennard in an interview on the Aquarium’s research boat, Skana.

“When whales are ‘happy,’ we see a lot of social behaviour, they’re a lot like us in that respect,” he said. “We see larger groups, lots of playing, lots of pushing and shoving and jumping and rolling over on their backs.”

Take a look at my CBC TV story (vid link) to see killer whales, and learn what other threats they face.

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.

This week, NOAA announced it’s reviewing the humpback’s status. A recent international study puts the North Pacific population estimate at almost 20,000, up from a low of less than 2,000 animals.

While humpback numbers are now growing steadily, the population is still just one-fifth of the pre-whaling size, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

good, but good enough?

“It’s been such a gift to watch them come back,” Jackie Hildering told me this week. She’s a naturalist with Stubbs Island Whale Watching in Telegraph Cove, and remembers in 2002 when humpback sightings were uncommon in the Broughton Archipelago.

This year, she identified 47 individuals. She laughs in wonder as she recalled to me juvenile humpbacks energetically slapping their tails on the water.

But Hildering worries what a loss of protection could mean for the whales, given that status can help drive research funding. “There’s just so much we don’t understand about these animals,” she said.

Dr. Jay Barlow, one of NOAA’s own lead scientists studying humpbacks, told me he agrees are still many unknowns — especially when it comes to climate change.

For example, will the whales be able to change their migration routes to find food? “The same places where whales have been going to in the past that have been good for feeding in the past may not be good places for the future,” he told me in a phone interview from La Jolla, CA.

“If their habitat changes, will they be flexible enough to deal with that? We don’t really know at this point,” said Barlow.

When do you think it’s time to take a species off the endangered list? Is it time for Canada to review the humpback’s status too?

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.

Pros and Antis

I’ve seen two camps of reaction: people who are surprised antibacterials are considered harmful, and people who have known that for years and are surprised anyone is surprised. (As a recent post on yoyomama notes, triclosan was one of the chemicals the authors of Slow Death By Rubber Duck loaded their systems with.)

Dr. Bonnie Henry says ad campaigns are adding to confusion:

People think that having ‘antibacterial’ on it means it’s more healthful and it’s going to protect myself and my family. And they honestly believe that because of the advertising. When in reality it may cause harm, and it’s certainly not needed.”

I’m happy to hear a prominent health official talk about this. I’ve long avoided antibacterials, not because I’d researched them carefully, but because past biology-student roommates had ranted about their damaging effects on the environment.

It was an easy decision because I’m not remotely germophobic. But it’s nice to see what’s good for human and environmental health aligning once again.

More of the doctor’s advice after the jump.

Dr. Henry also recommends:

• Soap and water (and time to scrub) are the best tools for handwashing
• Warm or cold water are both fine
• Avoid antibacterial soap, including the ingredient triclosan
• Dry your hands with paper towel, hand dryer or air before touching anything
• Hand sanitizers don’t work as well as handwashing, but can help if you don’t have access to soap and water, provided they are 60-90% alcohol

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.

My thoughts sorted themselves out a bit tonight at the round table on new media organized by Kevin Grandia at Hoggan & Associates. (You can read some of the discussion captured on Raul’s blog).

One key for me is separating the content from the platform.

If it’s in a gallery, it must be Art

The discussion brought back a fine arts lecture from university, about the construct of the art gallery.

The argument was that a painting or whatever becomes Art not because it’s a good painting, or a challenging painting, but because it is hanging in a big important room with white walls.

Essentially, the art is Art because the curator said so. (Even if it’s a signed urinal.)

The room or the painting?

You’ve probably guessed by now that the gallery is the traditional media outlet, and the painting is the actual content.

And is it, on some level, ridiculous that the room decides the art? Sure. Is all art in the room good, and all art out of the room bad? No.

Is there still good and bad art? Yes.

I’m a lot more interested in the painting than the room. And that’s where I like to see the new/old media argument headed — toward a discussion of the stories told and audience(s) served.

Kevin challenged the traditional media folks to identify something the new media can learn from us. So here goes: I say the old media is rich with expert storytellers, who have honed their craft by doing it every day. And the best know who they serve — the audience first.

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? Both say their print directory is still well used. But, they’re responding to the concerns by letting people get off the distribution list if they want to.

Canpages: You can opt out now

This is the newer book in Metro Vancouver, but Canpages still delivers more than 800,000 business directories here (about the same number as their competition, the Yellow Pages Group, and at about the same time).

Their Director of Marketing, Michael Oldewening, told me you can opt-out now from Canpages directory — and you have been able to for years. This year, for the first time, he said, there is a feedback form in the directory (page 142 in Vancouver edition) where you can request removal from the distribution list. You can also do that online here.

Oldewening said only 50 to 60 people have done that so far in the Vancouver area. It’s unclear whether that low number is because the remainder want to receive the book, don’t know that opting out is an option, or know it is but can’t be bothered.

Yellow Pages Group: Opting out in 2009

Right now, you can’t opt out of the Yellow Pages Group directory, but that’s changing this year. (As Darren had translated from Montreal coverage of the topic)

I spoke to Paul Batchelor, the VP of Sales for for the Western Region. He said they also hadn’t had many requests to opt out. But, Yellow Pages is starting a program in time for the 2010 phone book to address concerns about the waste of unwanted books.

What about a reverse-onus program, where you have to opt-in to get one? Not something Yellow Pages would consider now, said Batchelor. According to their research, two-thirds of the population uses a phone book on a regular basis, so that wouldn’t make sense, he said.