Building a global newsroom for a planet in crisis: A conversation with Willie Shubert

For Willie Shubert, journalism is a kind of cartography. “I studied geography,” he says. Mapmaking taught him how to see the world as a system. That systems view now guides his work as Executive Editor and Vice President of Programs at Mongabay, as he helps steer the environmental news organization through one of the most turbulent moments in the planet’s history. Shubert oversees Mongabay’s English-language newsroom—its largest—and shapes the organization’s global editorial strategy. His remit spans from deciding which forest to investigate next to building the conceptual scaffolding 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. Willie Shubert searching for lemurs in Madagascar. Photo by Rhett