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?

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 Even if I remembered every nephron and neuron I scribbled down in a final exam, my information is more than a decade out of date.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.

• 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.

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.

While this isn’t about journalism or science, I am posting here because I do think these relate directly to living better with a smaller footprint.

Have more space

And by this I mean, have less stuff. There are a lot of reasons for this, here are two. I pay a substantial chunk of my income toward mortgage on my Vancouver home. It’s a condo, but of ample size, and I want it to feel ample to us. Does x piece of stuff really deserve a square foot in a housing market where each square foot runs $300 to $400? (As much as I like numbers, I don’t actually calculate each belonging’s owed rent, but it is a way to think about it.)

The other reason is less practical, but just as important. When I’m travelling, I really enjoy how everything that makes it in the backpack really deserves to be there. (It fits, looks good, works, whatever.) I’m not going to reduce my belongings to a backpack, but I’d rather feel that way looking around my home.

Lately, I’ve found Vancouver blogger Minimalist Mom inspiring on this topic, and I still think about some lessons learned from the Clean Bin Project people.

Cook more

We already cook, and eat out seldom, but I’d like to have less stress around getting home from work and wondering what’s for dinner…without relying too heavily on packaged/processed food.

This is very much in the zeitgeist now too, from Jamie Oliver’s projects teaching people to cook and improving school food, to a recent book by Laurie David (producer of Inconvenient Truth) on family dinners.

I’m no gourmet chef but lately I’ve been inspired in a few recipes by a friend who is, who writes online at kitchengretchen. She’s a personal chef and a mom in the San Francisco area, and I envy her garden’s growing season (and her skills of course).

I’ll also be checking out Patent and the Pantry, where another friend and journalist, Gwendolyn Richards, writes about food. She’s planning to try a new recipe each week, so maybe I can steal some.

How do you live better with less?

[Update: Reading over, "enough" in the title sounds a little exasperated to me. I mean to take the opposite position; there is enough space to live in, there is enough food and time to cook, there is enough, just make it work.]

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.

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.