Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
“I knew I was disposable.”
That realization, from earlier in his career, helps guide Willie Shubert today in building a kind and capable global newsroom.
Shubert oversees Mongabay’s English-language newsroom — its largest — and shapes the organization’s global editorial strategy. His work ranges from deciding which forest to investigate next to building the conceptual framework for Mongabay’s model of impact. “This work enables Mongabay to scale up the volume and size of grants that fund our journalism,” he explains in an interview.
His days are spent shifting constantly between tasks: assessing security risks for reporters in remote regions, drafting proposals, and refining the workflows that keep a globally distributed newsroom aligned. “My day-to-day life is quite diverse,” he says.
Shubert’s path began at National Geographic, where he helped produce more than 30 international editions of the magazine. It was, he recalls, “a crash course in how to do high-quality journalism with a lot of resources.” Acting as a “living English dictionary” for translators taught him precision, while launching the magazine’s early social media channels showed him how legacy institutions could reach new audiences. But he soon realized he wanted to be closer to the work itself. “I wasn’t in a position to practice journalism,” he says. “Competition was fierce, and I knew I was disposable.”
He found that opportunity at Internews’s Earth Journalism Network, where he helped build a global community of environmental reporters — many in the Global South — capable of explaining complex science in accessible ways. He also helped create data-driven outlets such as InfoAmazonia and launched a grants program that helped local journalists tell stories once overlooked by international media. “The best opportunity for a journalist isn’t a workshop or a fellowship,” he says. “It’s a job.”
That conviction ultimately led him to Mongabay, whose model — paying journalists to produce independent environmental reporting — matched his vision for durable impact. For Shubert, that impact is seen not in clicks but in “forests still standing.” He cites investigations that halted plantation expansion in Suriname and blocked a carbon deal in Malaysian Borneo that would have displaced Indigenous communities.
Such outcomes, he says, depend on persistence and trust.
“You have to trust people,” he says. “No one can do it alone.” For Shubert, journalism is slow, patient work — connecting evidence with empathy so that people can make better decisions for the environment and humanity, one story at a time.
Read the full interview with Willie Shubert here.
Banner image: Willie Shubert with lemurs at a rehabilitation center in Madagascar. Visitors aren’t permitted to touch the lemurs, but the lemurs do as they please. Image by Rhett Ayers Butler/Mongabay.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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