Rhett Ayers Butler
On the evening of Jan. 5, Mongabay journalist Gerry Flynn was denied entry to Cambodia while returning from a vacation. Immigration officials at the airport told Flynn that he is “permanently banned” from Cambodia because there was “an error” on a document submitted as part of his last visa extension application. He was subsequently forced [Continue reading]
High-quality data journalism serves as a powerful tool in elucidating complex environmental issues, transforming raw data into compelling narratives that illuminate the hidden stories behind the numbers. By employing rigorous data collection and analysis, journalists can uncover trends and patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed, providing a solid foundation for investigative reporting. But how do [Continue reading]
Driven by a desire to share my book on tropical rainforests with the public for free, I established Mongabay in 1999. 25 years on, Mongabay has evolved from a website hosting my book to a comprehensive platform covering a wide range of environmental topics far beyond tropical forests. Mongabay has since evolved from a website [Continue reading]
This week we learned that Mongabay won the BBVA Foundation’s 5th Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication. Mongabay was selected “for its outstanding track record in communicating on nature and biodiversity conservation, especially in the countries of the Global South, thanks to the contributions of over 800 journalists, scientists and other correspondents in more than 80 [Continue reading]
Over the weekend I migrated my photo collection from travel.mongabay.com to pictures.butlernature.com. Mongabay’s growing maturity as an institution is the motivation for this action. The site has evolved from a collection of personal projects to a multinational news organization. Therefore it makes sense to discontinue or migrate some of the projects that are no longer [Continue reading]
In April, I formally joined the advisory council for the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Bioacoustics will revolutionize biodiversity monitoring, transform how we evaluate the effectiveness of conservation, and create new opportunities to engage the public around wildlife and ecosystems. The K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation [Continue reading]
Ten years ago this month, we established Mongabay-Indonesia with a goal of increasing transparency and accountability in Indonesia’s forest sector. Mongabay-Indonesia would go on to lay the groundwork for Mongabay’s global expansion. The path to launching an Indonesian-language environmental news service was a serendipitous one. But I believed that Indonesia was an under-served market when [Continue reading]
In 2016 we formally established Mongabay Latam, a Spanish-language environmental news service that aimed to improve coverage of critical planetary issues in the most biologically diverse region of the world. Five years in, Latam has greatly exceeded our hopes and expectations. Today Latam has monthly onsite readership that regularly exceeds 600,000, a network of contributing [Continue reading]
Mongabay just hit 1 billion lifetime pageviews. It took almost 23 years. Here’s my key takeaway from the journey. One billion pageviews is a small number compared with platforms like YouTube and Facebook or mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, but for a niche provider of environmental news like Mongabay, the interest in our [Continue reading]
Mongabay persevered through the many challenges of 2021, continuing to publish high quality journalism and expand our impact. We ended the year stronger than we began it. Key numbers In 2021 we published nearly 5,000 stories in six languages covering more than 110 countries. This reporting attracted 54 million users to our website, including visitors [Continue reading]
It was a challenging year, but as 2021 draws to a close, I wanted to share a few highlights from Mongabay. Dip in traffic; big jump in engagementLike many news outlets, Mongabay experienced a dip in traffic relative to 2020 when lockdowns drove a surge in online activity during the first phase of the pandemic. [Continue reading]
This is a response to today’s news that I received a 2020 SEAL Journalism Award along with Fiona Harvey of The Guardian; Alexander C. Kaufman of The Huffington Post; Lisa Friedman of the New York Times; Dave Roberts of Volts; Brian L. Kahn of Earther / Gizmodo; Shannon Osaka of Grist; Zoya Teirstein of Grist; [Continue reading]