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Arts, Culture And Digital Storytelling · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Casey: Hey there. On today's episode, thirty-one motorcycles rolled out for the Cariboo Toy Run, and nobody thinks the bikes were the point. So when a funder asks how many people came to your festival, what is that number standing in for? We dig into it, plus a Lancet review covering nine million young people. Stick around.
• 0:31
  Casey: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Casey. It's Monday, October 5th, 2026, and today's theme is Arts, Culture & Digital Storytelling. Reaching you from the Cariboo, on lands that have been cared for by the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh peoples since time immemorial.
• 0:53
  Riley: And I'm Riley. Today we're looking at who tells the stories in a small town, and what gets counted when someone tries to measure whether they mattered. Out at Horsefly Lake it's clear and around 8 this morning, with a high of 17 and light drizzle through the day, about a 33 percent chance. 100 Mile House and Quesnel are both around 8 and clear, Williams Lake is overcast at 6, and Anahim Lake is partly cloudy at 2.
• 1:20
  Casey: Dress in layers. News first.
• 1:23
  Casey: A lot of today's news sits close to home, in fundraisers and community turnouts, so we'll start there.
• 1:30
  Riley: Thirty-one motorcycles rolled out for the fourth annual Cariboo Toy Run on Sunday. The Cariboo Motorcycle Association organized it, and the Williams Lake Tribune's Khushi Arora covered the ride. Riders collect toys for kids who would otherwise go without, so the haul matters more than the horsepower. Four years in, it's a fixture on the fall calendar. The coverage I have puts the turnout at thirty-one bikes and doesn't say how many toys came in, and that's the number the kids care about.
• 2:02
  Casey: Also in Williams Lake, the Lions Club has wrapped up its raffle, and a letter in the Tribune explains why it matters. The club was established in 1965 and belongs to Lions Clubs International. The raffle is its major fundraiser, and the letter says the money lets the club keep up its community support through the year. Sixty-one years is a long run for a service club in a town this size.
• 2:26
  Riley: In 100 Mile House, the 2026 Sockathon is aiming for 500 pairs of socks. Last year's drive raised 220 pairs, so the target is more than double. The 100 Mile Free Press reports it as a community challenge. Drives like this depend on drop-off points and a few people willing to sort and deliver.
• 2:47
  Casey: Ambitious. Feet are cold in November.
• 2:51
  Riley: Speaking of what rural families deal with day to day, a large review in The Lancet looks at how digital media affects young people's health. It's a three-paper series plus a meta-review that analyzed existing research including data from 9 million people under 25. The effects it examines run from nearsightedness to self-harm. The authors say there's still a lot we don't know, but the evidence of harm is enough to warrant government action. For rural families the screen is often the main window to friends and school, so the question of limits lands differently when the nearest rink is a forty-minute drive.
• 3:29
  Casey: Nine million people, and not one study designed around a Cariboo teenager with spotty signal.
• 3:36
  Riley: Tariffs are pushing up the price of musical instruments, and school music programs are feeling it. The New York Times reports a single cello can cost $1,000 and a tuba $9,000. The paper says the tariffs are straining meagre band and orchestra budgets. Small districts rarely have a surplus to absorb a jump like that.
• 3:56
  Casey: A tuba at nine thousand dollars is a mortgage payment with a mouthpiece.
• 4:02
  Riley: Microsoft is rethinking Copilot. The Verge reports that CEO Satya Nadella hosted an invite-only event last week for leaders from key enterprise customers. Instead of a flashy media event, he outlined where Copilot is headed. For small outfits in the Cariboo, the practical takeaway is that the assistant built into their office software will keep changing shape, and the settings they learned this year may not hold next year.
• 4:29
  Casey: On the consumer side, a How-To Geek writer says YouTube Music replaced his Plex setup. His pitch is that you can stop paying Plex to stream your own music, because YouTube offers the same thing free. It's a trade. Free usually means someone else holds your library, and a rural listener on a patchy connection should know the difference between a file stored at home and one streamed from far away.
• 4:52
  Riley: Another How-To Geek piece covers Excel tables. Tony Phillips describes seven ways he uses them. Press Ctrl+T and the banded rows are the least useful part. Formulas fill themselves in, lists grow as you add entries, and charts and totals stay current. A lot of Cariboo volunteer organizations keep their records on spreadsheets, and a table can save a treasurer an evening every month.
• 5:17
  Casey: GamesRadar has a long read on how Grand Theft Auto became a musical tastemaker. The in-game radio stations have broken and boosted artists, and the piece talks to two musicians who landed on them. One says having a hand in the game etches you in history. For an independent artist with no label, that's a kind of reach a regional tour can't match.
• 5:38
  Riley: Turning to the economy, the September jobs report shows Black unemployment rose sharply. Economists had taken a recent drop as a hopeful sign that job gains were lifting a broad share of workers. It's a U.S. figure, but a headline average can hide who is actually losing work.
• 5:56
  Casey: The Verge reports that AI is supercharging hacking, and smaller local institutions aren't ready. The story opens with Janice Malone, whose Alabama nonprofit, Vivian's Door, started getting calls in March about suspicious activity. Any small organization with a donor list and a bank account should check its passwords and who has access to the books.
• 6:16
  Riley: Rural data centres are in line for a federal tax break in the U.S. WIRED reports that under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, rural data centre projects could be eligible for major tax benefits starting next year. Some hyperscalers don't seem eager to take the free cash. A community weighing a proposal still has to ask what it gets in return.
• 6:38
  Casey: A two-year randomized clinical trial of 493 adults with overweight or obesity found that diet soft drinks were essentially as effective as water for long-term weight loss and maintenance. So the can in the fridge is not the villain it's been made out to be, at least by this measure.
• 6:56
  Riley: Now, a case that's hard to read about. NYT Top Stories asks how Christa Pike survived two lethal injections of pentobarbital.
• 7:05
  Casey: And last, a teardown. Hackaday covers a video in which a creator named Thomas opens up a 1960s Tektronix 545A oscilloscope. It's a heavy mainframe-style scope, and Hackaday says seeing it made them nostalgic and happy. A machine from the 1960s still being opened up and understood is the interesting part. Most of what we buy now can't be opened at all.
• 7:27
  Riley: Sixty years old and someone's still reading its insides. Plenty of software doesn't make it to six.
• 7:35
  Casey: The Williams Lake and District Seniors Activity Centre Society has been supporting Cariboo seniors since the 1970s. It runs social programs and fitness classes, serves a daily lunch, and offers volunteer-delivered home support that helps people stay independent in their own homes. If you've got a parent, neighbour, or friend who could use a hot lunch and good company, the centre is a good place to start.
• 7:59
  Riley: A daily lunch is a program anyone can measure, and it's still about much more than the lunch.
• 8:06
  Casey: When a funder gives a festival or a reading program money and then asks how many people came, what was that number supposed to be standing in for?
• 8:14
  Riley: Value. Reach. Somebody has to compare forty applications on a Tuesday, and a ticket count is the one number everybody reads the same way. A count is a floor. It tells you whether anyone showed up at all.
• 8:26
  Casey: A floor, sure. Then it becomes the ceiling. Look at how the Toy Run was reported. Thirty-one motorcycles. Nobody involved thinks the point of the day was thirty-one bikes. But the number is what made the headline.
• 8:38
  Riley: Because it's concrete. Thirty-one is a figure the audience can picture, and it can be compared to last year's.
• 8:45
  Casey: They can picture a ride. They can't picture what a toy did in a living room. The number survives and the thing it was for drops out.
• 8:53
  Riley: Drop the count altogether and what do you have? Narrative reports. Every grant application becomes a gorgeous story, and the funder can't tell which one is true. Counting at least has the discipline of someone being able to check.
• 9:07
  Casey: Can they check, though? Ticket counts in a town this size are self-reported by the people who need the next grant.
• 9:14
  Riley: Podcasts and web stories have it worse and better. Worse, because the numbers are easy to inflate. Better, because you can see repeat listeners and returning readers, which is closer to attention than a one-off ticket. Count the people who come back, not the people who showed up once.
• 9:32
  Casey: And then people optimize for coming back. Make it a habit, make it a streak. A metric aimed at attention ends up manufacturing attention. The Lancet series is a pile of evidence on exactly that: data on nine million people under 25 and what happens when products are tuned to hold young eyes.
• 9:49
  Riley: Ha.
• 9:49
  Casey: The authors tie it to harms from nearsightedness to self-harm. Nobody who built the engagement dashboard was trying to cause either. The dashboard counted time on screen, and time on screen became the goal.
• 10:01
  Riley: That's the extreme case. A library story hour doesn't have an algorithm. Repeat attendance at a reading program is somebody choosing to come back on a cold Tuesday. The proxy there is about as honest as proxies get.
• 10:14
  Casey: Until the funder wants it to grow every year. Growth is where a count stops measuring and starts demanding.
• 10:21
  Riley: Growth targets do distort. A flat line with steady attendance can be a success, and funders could say so in writing.
• 10:28
  Casey: Look at the Mother Jones piece. David Corn describes being dragged into a Russian disinformation operation built to look like real journalism. What makes it spread is the same thing that makes real journalism spread.
• 10:41
  Riley: Which is why engagement is a bad measure of a newsroom. But nobody running a Cariboo paper is competing with a troll farm for clicks. The relevant question is whether the Tribune can show a funder or advertiser that people read it.
• 10:55
  Casey: The Tribune has a thin newsroom. It's the outfit sitting through the council meeting. If its value gets measured in page views, the story about the sewer budget loses to the story about the motorcycles every time. The sewer budget is the one that affects your bill.
• 11:11
  Riley: Page views are one input. Subscriptions, letters to the editor, a council member who changed a vote because of something in print. That last one is rare to see counted.
• 11:21
  Casey: It's never counted. The thing a local paper is for, someone in power being watched, produces no number at all. A story that never gets written because an official knew someone was watching doesn't show up in analytics.
• 11:34
  Riley: So what's the alternative? A funder can't hand out money on "trust us, the council behaves."
• 11:39
  Casey: I don't have an alternative that scales. I have a complaint about the one that does.
• 11:44
  Riley: Complaints don't write grant criteria.
• 11:46
  Casey: Neither do headcounts. They just look like they do.
• 11:49
  Riley: The MoMA show on information design bears on this. Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design, said the pieces show the museum is always ready to understand what's important to the world in that moment. The article also makes the point that when people post infographics on Instagram, they're sharing facts and also trying to convey something about the kind of person they are.
• 12:14
  Casey: A chart is a personality.
• 12:16
  Riley: A chart is a claim you can look at. Good information design makes a number honest. It shows the denominator. It shows what's missing.
• 12:24
  Casey: The grant report with a handsome bar chart is information design too. It tells the funder you're the kind of organization that counts well. Whether the count means anything is a separate matter, and the chart is built to make you stop asking.
• 12:38
  Riley: That argues for better charts, not fewer.
• 12:40
  Casey: It argues for asking what the chart is about before admiring it.
• 12:44
  Riley: Take the spoken and written word, then, since that's where this gets sharpest. What would the right measure for a literacy program even be?
• 12:52
  Casey: Someone reads a lease they couldn't read before. Someone helps a kid with homework they couldn't help with before. The tally of sessions delivered is the part you can count, and it's the least interesting part. The interesting number is years. Years of a thing still being there.
• 13:08
  Riley: Longevity is a number. You can count years.
• 13:11
  Casey: You can, and no grant counts them. Grants run annually. They reward launching and reporting, not being the same reliable room every Tuesday for two decades. The accounting punishes boring.
• 13:22
  Riley: Some funders do multi-year core funding now.
• 13:25
  Casey: Some do. Good direction. It still runs on a renewal, and the renewal runs on a report, and the report runs on a count.
• 13:31
  Riley: So the count isn't going away. We agree on that.
• 13:34
  Casey: We do. We disagree on whether it stays a floor.
• 13:37
  Riley: Take the written word at the smallest scale. The Lions Club letter in the Tribune is a thank-you note and a financial report in one. Readers know the club, they know what it does, and the letter is accountability by familiarity.
• 13:51
  Casey: Which doesn't scale and doesn't transfer. A funder in Victoria can't read a letter like that. It only works when the reader already knows the writer.
• 14:00
  Riley: Local journalism has that too. Readers who know the reporter's name. You could argue that's the most trustworthy measure there is, and it can't be put in a spreadsheet.
• 14:11
  Casey: And it's what disappears first when a newsroom gets thinner, because a name on a byline takes years to build and one round of layoffs to lose.
• 14:18
  Riley: Take the Rick Hansen item. The Tribune reports a special screening of a film chronicling the Man in Motion World Tour is coming to Williams Lake. Seats will be counted. But a room full of people watching a story about someone wheeling around the world is a different thing than seats.
• 14:36
  Casey: What a room does afterward. Who talks in the lobby. Who goes home and tells somebody. A funder wanting to know that would have to ask, and then listen to answers that don't sum.
• 14:46
  Riley: Then ask. One question on the way out the door. What would you tell someone about tonight? Record the answers. Five minutes of audio, published raw.
• 14:54
  Casey: As a podcast.
• 14:55
  Riley: As a podcast. The medium we're in is cheap and carries voices. You'd have forty people saying what a screening or a festival was for, in their own words. Nobody has to code responses, and a listener can hear the difference between polite and moved.
• 15:10
  Casey: And who picks the question?
• 15:11
  Riley: The organizers.
• 15:13
  Casey: There it is. The organizer picks the question and the answers arrive pre-flattered. People standing in the lobby with a microphone tell you it was lovely. The funder's version of the question and the audience's version are different questions.
• 15:27
  Riley: Then let the audience write it. A first draft at a community meeting. What would you want counted?
• 15:32
  Casey: Huh. That one I'd watch. I can't predict what a room of Williams Lake people would put on the list, and neither can a program officer in Victoria.
• 15:41
  Riley: Your bet is they'd say something no ticket stub captures.
• 15:44
  Casey: My bet is they'd say it was somebody they knew on stage. Or that the Tribune was there. Or that it happened in the first place. Existing is a metric, in a town where things quit.
• 15:54
  Riley: Existing is countable. A festival that ran for ten straight years has a number attached.
• 16:00
  Casey: Same as the Lions Club at sixty-one. Nobody gets a medal, and the town would notice at once if it stopped.
• 16:07
  Riley: Audio answers are easy to cherry-pick, though. The organizer plays the three warmest clips. At least a count is dull enough that nobody bothers to dress it up.
• 16:16
  Casey: People dress up counts constantly. Round a number, pick the generous week, count the volunteers as attendees. A dull number is not an honest one.
• 16:25
  Riley: Then publish the raw audio, all of it, so anyone can listen to the forty and not just the three. Raw is checkable in a way a summary isn't.
• 16:34
  Casey: Nobody will listen to forty clips.
• 16:36
  Riley: Some will. The ones who care most, which is the useful audience for a check.
• 16:41
  Casey: A handful of people listening to all forty is a better audit than a program officer reading one summary. It still doesn't answer who picks the question.
• 16:50
  Riley: So should funders keep counting?
• 16:51
  Casey: Count the cheap, checkable things and put them in the appendix. Make the front page a question somebody in the room wrote. The count is for the auditor and the question is for the town.
• 17:02
  Riley: I'd keep the count on the first page. It's the only thing a skeptical funder will believe, and I'd pair it with the audio rather than bury it.
• 17:10
  Casey: A count on page one becomes the goal by year three. I haven't seen a case where keeping it stayed a floor.
• 17:17
  Riley: And I haven't seen dropping it work at scale. So test it. Next month, one Williams Lake event asks its audience one question on the way out and posts the audio next to the ticket count, same page, side by side.
• 17:30
  Casey: And somebody checks in a year whether anyone changed what they did because of the audio. I still doubt the count will stay humble, but that would be evidence. If you've got a view on what a festival or a paper in this region should be asked, send it to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 17:47
  Riley: And if somebody sends a better question than ours, we'll say so on air. Have a good Monday.