Mongabay.org

Moth in Riau, Sumatra. Taken by Rhett Butler in February 2014.

2014 has been a big year for Mongabay. Here’s a list of ten highlights from the past twelve months.

2014 was Mongabay’s 15th birthday. Accordingly, we threw our first-ever fundraising event in October.

World-renowned conservationist Jane Goodall joined the Mongabay.org board.

In November, Mongabay surpassed 200 million lifetime visitors.

We launched the Mongabay Reporting Network to build out a network of environmental correspondents around the world. The pilot project focused on unearthing stories buried within Global Forest Watch’s treasure trove of data.

Mongabay’s full-time staff in the U.S. doubled to four people.

Mongabay awarded ten special reporting initiative prizes amounting to more than $150,000 in support of journalists to investigate key issues.

Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler won the prestigious Parker-Gentry Award from the Field Museum. Normally reserved for scientists, it was the first time the prize was awarded to a journalist.

Indonesia’s new president acknowledged Mongabay. During a visit to Sinabung, Jokowi was asked a question by journalist Roby Ayat, who identified himself as a Mongabay-Indonesia correspondent. The president replied: “I’ll answer the question from Rhett Butler’s man first, it must be a question about the environment.”

Mongabay-Indonesia, an Indonesian-language environmental news service launched in mid-2012, broke a million annual readers for the first time. It will finish 2014 with 1.3 million visitors, a 128% increase over 2013.

In October, Mongabay published its 10,000th news article in English.

Beyond these internal achievements, we also had broader impacts, including spurring investigations into corruption, trafficking, and illegal forest clearing in Indonesia; serving as an information source and adviser on a number of mainstream media stories on forests; and participating in the making of a film and a TV series (both are due out in 2015).
 
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