About
Lisa Richardson is a writer and journalist with a dirty secret – a tendency to drift towards the dark side of communications. Adopting her after-dark persona of hype-mistress, Richardson has developed communications strategies, webcopy, spoken word and video scripts, and outreach campaigns that integrate traditional and social media for clients including Crankworx, Whistler Blackcomb, Tourism Pemberton, the Village of Pemberton, the Pemberton Economic Development Commission, the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival, as well as theatre companies, small businesses and community organisations. She cofounded Pemberton’s Slow Food Cycle Sunday, helped launch the Kathy Barnett Leadership Lunch, wrote the Peak2Peak gondola story On The Shoulders of Giants, conceived the Whistler Museum’s storytelling smackdown Icon Gone, and provided integrated marketing solutions to see the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival through to its 10th anniversary.
She has spent the last year as Communications Strategist, Social Media Manager and Writer at Origin Design + Communications where she served as founding editor of the Whistler Insider blog, braintrusted the Whistler Blackcomb Embedded campaign and the Tourism Whistler Sabbatical Project, and worked on campaigns and copy for Whistler Blackcomb, Tourism Whistler, Jay Peak, Bike Parks of BC, IMBA, Arc’teryx and The North Face.
She has also delivered several presentations on the use of social media tools as part of a marketing and creative arsenal for independent producers, artisans, writers and farmers market vendors.
She insists that she is not married to hype. “I’m married to story. I just fool around with hype on the side.”
Her Clark Kent persona is as a narrative, lifestyle and ski journalist. She broke the story of plans to erect a gondola on Squamish’s Stawamus Chief, triggering an international protest and the developers’ withdrawal of the proposal, covered the 2010 Winter Olympic Games for NBCOlympics.com and investigated the story behind one of Canada’s largest avalanche incidents for an article for Kootenay Mountain Culture magazine that is now used as part of the Province’s Emergency Program avalanche Search and Rescue curriculum. She recently served as a judge for the Western Magazine Awards (service writing) and the North American Ski Journalists Association Awards (features writing).
Richardson has contributed to a host of publications and outlets including a new anthology of ski-writing Skiing The Edge, CBC radio, Pique newsmagazine, www.thetyee.ca, the Vancouver Sun, the National Post, Whistler the Magazine, SBC Skier, Kootenay Mountain Culture, Just for Canadian Doctors, Freeskier, Mountain Life Magazine, and The Ski Journal. She is the editor of Choose Pemberton.
As a Gemini and an Australian-Canadian, juggling a hybrid identity comes pretty naturally. She figures she must be fooling someone… she was just voted Pemberton’s favourite writer by the Pique’s Best Of… awards, for the third year in a row.
