Nonprofit
Volunteer Writer — Southern Resident Orcas and the Sound of the Salish Sea
Details
Description
Organization description
Orcasound runs a network of underwater microphones across the Salish Sea, streaming live audio free to anyone who wants to listen for Southern Resident killer whales. Beta OS is the team that builds the software on top of it — the websites, the listening apps, and the tools that let a researcher or a student find one whale call in a thousand hours of ocean noise.
We’re a Washington nonprofit, about twenty designers, researchers and engineers, nearly all of us volunteers. There are 73 Southern Residents left. The work is about making it possible for ordinary people to hear them, understand what they’re hearing, and do something about it.
The role
We’re looking for one writer to publish a researched article every other week on Substack about the Southern Residents and underwater sound in the Salish Sea.
What you’d write about:
- What underwater sound reveals about these whales — how they hunt, communicate and navigate by listening
- Vessel noise, salmon decline and habitat, and the science connecting them
- What the hydrophone network picks up, and what gets built on top of it. A raw feed is thousands of hours of ocean noise, and a whale call might be eleven seconds of it. The engineering is what makes that findable — spectrograms, machine learning models that flag a call, a searchable catalog of what different pods sound like, alerts that go out when something is heard. That’s the Beta OS side of the story, and almost nobody tells it
- How someone with no background can get involved — listening, reporting what they hear, volunteering
You would not be starting from a blank page. We have a content strategy with defined themes, a bank of roughly forty researched topic ideas, and a competitive scan of what the other Salish Sea organizations already cover. Our finding was that nobody in this landscape writes about sound. That’s the gap you’d be filling.
You’d also have direct access to the people doing the work — the engineers and product team building the tools.
Time commitment
About 4 to 6 hours every two weeks, remote, on your own schedule. We’re asking for an initial three-month commitment, with the option to continue.
Who we’re looking for
- You can research a technical subject and write about it clearly for a general reader
- You care about marine conservation, or you’re curious enough to learn fast
- You can hold a steady publishing rhythm without someone chasing you
- Writing samples of any kind — published clips, a personal blog, coursework, a newsletter
No marine science background required. Some of the best writing about this comes from people who arrived as newcomers and wrote down what surprised them.
What you get
- A real byline and a portfolio of published work on a subject almost nobody covers
- Direct contact with working marine researchers and software engineers
- A reference from our Fundraising Lead, and a say in what we publish
To apply
Send a short note about why this interests you and one or two writing samples. Any format is fine.
Location
Associated Location
Please fill out this form
Send us a short note and a sample of your writing.
In the note, tell us:
- Why this subject interests you. A couple of sentences is plenty
- What you'd want to write about first, if you already have an idea
- Roughly when you'd be able to start
For the sample, anything published or unpublished works — a clip, a blog post, a newsletter, a class paper, a long post you're proud of. One or two pieces, and they don't need to be about marine science or conservation.
Please don't write anything new for us as part of applying. We'd rather see what you've already done.
We read everything and reply either way, usually within a week.
