Rhett Ayers Butler
Not all platforms are worth it After I shared the story behind Mongabay’s decision to deprioritize Facebook, several people asked: Where should impact-driven organizations focus their energy instead? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The best platform depends on your audience and what you want them to do with the information you share. Are you trying to [Continue reading]
I trust you are well. It’s meant to sound polite. It often isn’t. Over the years, I’ve come to see that how we open conversations matters. Yet this phrase lingers—empty, impersonal, and detached. This may seem trivial given everything happening in the world, but communication matters. If we want it to be meaningful, let’s rethink [Continue reading]
Want to raise money from foundations? It’s not just about persistence—it’s about speaking their language. When I first started seeking foundation support for Mongabay, I faced a wall of silence. No responses. When I was lucky, I got a “No thanks.” At the time, I thought I was taking the right approach. I targeted foundations [Continue reading]
At Mongabay, we frequently document the harm extractive industries inflict on the environment, wildlife, and communities globally. However, journalism itself can sometimes be extractive. This issue arises when journalists enter a community to report a story, gather context, and then leave. Despite the journalist’s best intentions, if the story isn’t accessible to the community in [Continue reading]
Obituaries are hard to write. But an obituary is something many people will need to write at some point in their life. And it will often be for someone deeply loved and admired. Capturing a person’s life in a short tribute is challenging. After all, how does one represent the joy a person has brought [Continue reading]
Next week marks 25 years since I founded Mongabay out of my passion for nature. I never imagined that a personal effort to raise awareness about tropical forests would evolve into a global network of dedicated journalists reporting from nature’s frontlines. It’s been incredible to see the contributions of these talented individuals making a real-world [Continue reading]
Scammers have long used my name for phishing attempts and other scams, and it seems that this practice is on the rise. If you receive an email message that puports to be from me, please verify the sender’s email address to ensure it originates from one of my known addresses, typically those associated with mongabay.com, [Continue reading]
In response to my recent LinkedIn post about Mongabay’s decision to deprioritize Facebook, a number of people have asked about Mongabay’s experience with LinkedIn. We started prioritizing LinkedIn as an outreach channel in the past few months, so I’m by no means an expert and can only share our early experiences with the platform. So [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]
Meta is getting a lot of attention this week after it reported losing users for the first time in its history, resulting in its stock market valuation plunging $230 billion in a single day. As a nonprofit news organization that once relied heavily on Meta’s platforms for distribution – especially Facebook – this news isn’t [Continue reading]
“How do I get my project covered on Mongabay?” As the founder of Mongabay, this is one of the questions I’m frequently asked. For those of you who don’t know Mongabay, we’re a non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform. The Mongabay newsroom is flooded with story ideas and pitches on a daily basis from [Continue reading]
As a person who runs a conservation news outlet, I’m often asked by scientists, NGOs, community leaders, and others for tips on how to get journalists to cover their work. The quality of your work doesn’t necessarily translate to press attention: Many excellent initiatives and organizations get very little visibility. But you can increase the [Continue reading]
10 years ago this month, I founded Mongabay.org with a mission to deliver news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline. The non-profit would build on the foundation established by Mongabay.com, the website I created in 1999. When I started Mongabay.org, I had no prior experience running a non-profit, no fundraising know-how, and few connections to foundations [Continue reading]