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Rhett Ayers Butler
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. But despite […]
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; […]