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…This article was originally published on Mongabay
