I recently had the pleasure to speak with Brodie Hopkins for the “Protect the World” podcast. The episode is titled Journalism for People and the Planet with Rhett Butler.
Protect the World is dedicated to the people and orgs making the world a better place. Every month, Hopkins connects with an NGO that’s addressing inequality or biodiversity loss.
Here is a summary of three questions and answers from the conversation.
Hopkins: Pick one person, living or dead, and live their entire life from start to finish. You pause your life right now, live that whole life, experiencing everything they’ve experienced, and then come back to your life with all of their memories. Who do you choose?
Me: I’d choose one of the first humans to set foot in either Australia or Madagascar to witness what the world looked like back then. It would’ve been terrifying but amazing to see megafauna that had never encountered humans before. Between the two, I’m partial to Madagascar—so let’s go with that.
Hopkins: What is Mongabay’s funding model since you don’t rely on advertising?
Me: Mongabay started as a for-profit, relying on advertising. For-profit models typically monetize traffic through ads or subscriptions. However, by 2015, we transitioned to a non-profit (https://mongabay.cc/rczybi), with funding primarily from donations and grants. Ads account for less than 1% of our budget.
This shift allowed us to prioritize impact over traffic. For instance, we once had substantial traffic from Facebook, but it was mostly low-quality—people visited briefly without substantively engaging. A few years ago, we shifted our focus to platforms that fostered deeper engagement. After this decision, our traffic dropped significantly, but the time spent on Mongabay in aggregate actually increased. Under a for-profit model, this loss would have affected ad revenue, but as a non-profit, it made sense. Ultimately, the focus on deeper engagement among key audiences aligns with our mission to maximize impact.
Hopkins: For the first 10 years, you ran Mongabay on your own. Now you have over 100 staff & 1000 contributing journalists globally. What changed?
Me: I started Mongabay as a side project to raise awareness about tropical forests. It gained popularity, and by 2004, I quit my full-time job to focus on it.
In 2008, I hired our first staffer, Jeremy Hance. I had ideas for scaling Mongabay’s impact that advertising could not support: Specifically an Indonesian-language environmental news service. So I formed the non-profit to pursue that.
With this decision, I knew I would have to give up doing what I loved – reporting – to instead become a manager and fundraiser. I didn’t know whether I’d be good at those things, but I understood that building an organization to provide opportunities for journalists to report from Nature’s frontline would ultimately have a much greater impact than me continuing to focus on writing articles. With a lot of hard work, Mongabay got to where it is today.