Volunteer Writer — Southern Resident Orcas and the Sound of the Salish Sea

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.