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Reimagining Environmental Journalism · New Thinking for a New World

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to New Thinking for a New World, a Tilburg Foundation podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: I am Alan Stoga, your host.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Each week I bring you conversations with people who think differently about the great issues that are shaping our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Geopolitics, disruptive tech, mass migration, the changing climate, culture wars, all of it is grist for our mill.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy listening.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: I also hope you will let me know what you think.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: and that you join the conversation at telbergfoundation.org.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: And now for today's episode of New Thinking for a New World.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: By almost every objective indicator, the process of dramatic climate change grinds on.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: However, the optimists are currently making a big deal out of the notion that warming might top out between two point five and three degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels compared to earlier higher scenarios.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: And Bill Gates now assures us that it is poverty, not climate change, that is potentially catastrophic.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Color me not reassured.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: When it comes to the environment, what people around the world need is reliable fact-based information about how the places in which they live are actually changing.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: They need to be empowered with accessible science, and the voices and knowledge of those directly impacted by environmental change amplified in ways that might actually produce positive outcomes.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Thank God for something called Mongo Bay.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Rhett Butler founded and built Mongo Bay as a global digital platform for high quality journalism about the environment.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: He and they have deservedly won endless journalism awards, but far more importantly, Mongo Bay is practically the only reliable source for consistently objective reporting on conservation and the environment on a global basis.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: I don't know if Butler is more passionate about journalism or about conservation.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: I do know that we all benefit from the combination of those passions.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: That's a big part of the reason that we recently announced Rhett Butler as one of the twenty-twenty-five Tilburg SNF Eliason Global Leadership Prize winners.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Rhett, to new thinking for a new world.
• 2:18
  Speaker 0: Thank you so much for having me.
• 2:19
  Speaker 0: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: I often start these conversations at sixty thousand feet and then drill down.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: But my impression of Manga Bay and of you is that your superpower is the opposite.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: You and your colleagues seem to be in the business of ground truthing.
• 2:34
  Speaker 0: Yeah, that's right.
• 2:35
  Speaker 0: So we've built a network of local reporters all around the world.
• 2:40
  Speaker 0: So about the thousand contributors in about eighty countries.
• 2:43
  Speaker 0: And so we have people on the front lines who are getting those stories and bringing them to a global audience.
• 2:51
  Speaker 0: At the same time, we do take that sixty thousand foot and higher view as well by leveraging data from satellites.
• 2:59
  Speaker 0: And so that can provide like a nice high-level overview of what's happening.
• 3:02
  Speaker 0: But then you get the stories on the ground that add some color to the data.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: What I'd like to do in this conversation is talk both about journalism, but also about the environment.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: So let's start if it's okay with you with the journalism.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Too much of media, at least in Europe and the United States, has become advocacy journalism.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: And while you, I'm sure, and Manga Bay certainly have strong policy preferences, my impression as a reader is that you do a damn good job of separating the reporting from the advocacy.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: I'm sure it's conscious, but let me ask the softball question.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: Is it conscious?
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: How do you do that?
• 3:44
  Speaker 0: Yes, it is.
• 3:45
  Speaker 0: And so we do make a special effort to try to keep the advocacy out of our journalism when we recognize that people have different views on this issue, but our approach has always been to present information to help people make decisions rather than telling them what to do or think.
• 4:03
  Speaker 0: And so it does require that framing and our reporting to work towards that objective.
• 4:10
  Speaker 0: But we believe there's a role for advocacy in the world, but that's not where we've decided, that's not the approach that we take.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: The obvious question is, how do you do that?
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: The kinds of people who are drawn to environmental reporting tend to be people that truly believe there are environmental issues that have to be
• 4:30
  Speaker 0: addressed,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: that they are advocates in their souls, even if they're reporters in their brains.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: How do you maintain that the discipline of fact-based reporting in a world that doesn't like facts all
• 4:44
  Speaker 0: that much?
• 4:46
  Speaker 0: Well, part of it is letting the facts tell the story.
• 4:48
  Speaker 0: And so you can have a strong opinion about something.
• 4:53
  Speaker 0: But you don't necessarily need to bring that opinion into the report.
• 4:56
  Speaker 0: So you can interview sources, you can decide on what topics you choose to cover, which can support what you believe, but you're still using a journalistic, fact-based approach, an objective approach to support that.
• 5:13
  Speaker 0: And so just for example, we got this a lot where there may be say a mayor in Bolivia who's allowing illegal logging at National Park or is in groups with the illegal loggers.
• 5:28
  Speaker 0: And so an NGO can come out with a report saying, you know, why is this bad and why does we stop?
• 5:34
  Speaker 0: But a journalist's approach could just report on what is happening, the fact that this activity is occurring, that the mayor has oversight on it.
• 5:43
  Speaker 0: And so by bringing transparency to the situation, That can lead to outcomes because there are other actors in the space, whether they're a public prosecutor or a pressure group that can then push the issue.
• 5:57
  Speaker 0: And so our role in the ecosystem is highlighting what the issue is and why it matters, but not necessarily telling people what to do or think.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: One of the things that I love about Mongo Bay is the incredible range of your reporting.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: I have absolutely no idea how many stories you produce a year, but I was on the website this morning.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: and pulled three headlines.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: MPs across Latin America unite to stop fossil fuels in the Amazon.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: First, Orphish, Sighting, and Srimanka highlights citizen science and marine protection and connecting Indonesia's environmental stories to millions, which is a piece that you wrote.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: It points in the direction of the range of what you guys do.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: How do you cover the global environment at this level of detail?
• 6:45
  Speaker 0: Well, and those are just the English stories.
• 6:47
  Speaker 0: So if we're producing in six languages and soon to be eight.
• 6:51
  Speaker 0: And so the way it works is again, we built this global network of reporters around the world.
• 6:55
  Speaker 0: And then we also have bureaus.
• 6:56
  Speaker 0: And so we have five bureaus in different parts of the world that are geographic based, but also language based.
• 7:04
  Speaker 0: And so we have a lot of years out there and a lot of people who are on the ground who are collecting story ideas and identifying issues in the world that would be worth covering.
• 7:16
  Speaker 0: And so, you know, part of the value of this is having those sources who are on the front line or the jurors who are on the front lines.
• 7:23
  Speaker 0: But then we also have people who can bring together all those stories from around the world around a certain topic or a thematic area and also do those high level stories.
• 7:33
  Speaker 0: And so, you know, we can go both ways, but it's a very powerful and resilient network to have to support this environmental journalism.
• 7:43
  Speaker 0: And so it allows us to do stories on a wide range of issues, but also in a wide range of geographies.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the geography.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: You mentioned six languages going on eight.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: I have the impression that your footprint is bigger in the global south than it is in the global north.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Is that fair?
• 8:05
  Speaker 0: Yes, that would be correct.
• 8:06
  Speaker 0: So I would estimate seventy to eighty percent of our stories focus on the global south or primarily the tropics.
• 8:15
  Speaker 0: These are the regions that have the greatest amount of biodiversity, the highest rate of change, and so forth, therefore the highest degree of threat.
• 8:23
  Speaker 0: And so that's where we orient to our reporting.
• 8:26
  Speaker 0: And in line with that, about seventy, eighty percent of our staff are in the global south as well.
• 8:32
  Speaker 0: So we only have, I think, fifteen or sixteen staff in the United States, for example, out of a hundred and twenty-five people on the team.
• 8:40
  Speaker 0: And so our orientation is very much focused on places where we can, we feel like the journals are going to have a high marginal impact.
• 8:46
  Speaker 0: So places that don't have a lot of environmental coverage, that have a lot to lose, that are losing a lot at a high rate and where you can view journalism.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: And as you said, sort of by definition, near the equator than not, because that's where the change, other than in the Arctic and Antarctic, that's where the change is most profound.
• 9:05
  Speaker 0: That's correct.
• 9:06
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
• 9:06
  Speaker 0: So we do do some stories in the Yeah, I mean, the Arctic and industrialized countries, but it's a much smaller share.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: What is the distribution model?
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: It is a global platform.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: It's a global internet-based platform.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Do you co-publish with other organizations?
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: What do you do with the stories that you generate?
• 9:30
  Speaker 0: Yeah, so we have websites where we publish our stories.
• 9:34
  Speaker 0: And so that typically attracts between five and seven million people a month.
• 9:39
  Speaker 0: But then we also, of course, have a presence of social media, which is a way to reach more people.
• 9:44
  Speaker 0: But then all of our articles are produced under Open Creative Commons license, which means they can be used by anyone commercially or non-commercially.
• 9:54
  Speaker 0: And so in practice, there are many mainstream media outlets, especially outside the United States, who are republishing their stories and even monetizing our reporting.
• 10:06
  Speaker 0: And the reason we do that is our goal, you know, as a nonprofit, we're not monetizing traffic systems or our website if you're advertising.
• 10:14
  Speaker 0: We're trying to have our journalism contribute to meaningful impact in the world.
• 10:19
  Speaker 0: And so if our stories run on mainstream media outlets in India or Colombia or Peru, that means we're much more likely to reach the key decision makers who are who are target audiences.
• 10:31
  Speaker 0: And so that approach is very different from.
• 10:34
  Speaker 0: a typical for-profit model where you're trying to keep traffic on your website.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: I wasn't going to talk about business model, but you just did.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: So you are a not-for-profit, which means you're funded by whom?
• 10:48
  Speaker 0: So we're funded by grants from foundations and then donations from individuals.
• 10:52
  Speaker 0: And so that ranges anywhere from grassroots to high-net-worth individuals.
• 10:57
  Speaker 0: So we have a very diversified portfolio of funders.
• 11:02
  Speaker 0: for both maintaining our independence, but also for risk management.
• 11:08
  Speaker 0: And so currently no funder is more than six percent of our budget.
• 11:12
  Speaker 0: And so that gives us the power to say no to any funder.
• 11:16
  Speaker 0: And from being this space for more than a decade, the non-profit space, I've seen a number of non-profit media outlets that have gone under because they've been too dependent on one funder who, you know, when that funding ends or they changed their mind.
• 11:32
  Speaker 0: they're in a bad position.
• 11:33
  Speaker 0: And so this diversified approach has been a source of stability, but also helps shift the power and balance a little bit between philanthropy and being a nonprofit.
• 11:45
  Speaker 0: That said, Mongo Bay did start as a for-profit.
• 11:48
  Speaker 0: I mean, actually Mongo Bay started as nothing.
• 11:50
  Speaker 0: It was just a side project and there was no business model.
• 11:54
  Speaker 0: But eventually I put advertising on the website because it's a popular, it became viable.
• 11:59
  Speaker 0: And so the first... decade plus of Manga Bay was as a for-profit based off advertising.
• 12:05
  Speaker 0: But when I formed the nonprofit in order to pursue ideas that didn't have an advertising-based business model, it meant shifting from an ads approach to an impact approach.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about journalism just a little bit before we go on to the environment and conservation.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: You do reporting.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: You also do a lot of investigative journalism, which requires long-term following of stories.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: How do you choose those stories?
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: And could you give me an example of a couple of the things that have come to fruition recently?
• 12:40
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
• 12:40
  Speaker 0: And so editors are kind of the gatekeepers for deciding what investigations we're going to pursue.
• 12:49
  Speaker 0: And so investigations require far more resources than news reporting.
• 12:54
  Speaker 0: We were talking at least in order of magnitude sometimes.
• 12:57
  Speaker 0: greater than that, because it just requires a huge amount of due diligence and late work to ensure that, well, first of all, to get what the story is, but then do the rigorous verification that's required for ensuring that the story has integrity.
• 13:12
  Speaker 0: And so those investigations can sometimes take more than two years.
• 13:17
  Speaker 0: So they're a big investment.
• 13:19
  Speaker 0: That said, we do a lot of news reporting around those investigations as well.
• 13:22
  Speaker 0: So you come out with an investigation, but then there's news articles that can frame certain aspects of that investigation that can provide updates and things of that nature.
• 13:33
  Speaker 0: In terms of impact from investigation, so yes, investigations tend to have a large number of outcomes that result from that effort.
• 13:44
  Speaker 0: So an example from a couple of years ago was there was a story that started out looking at labor abuse in the fisheries fleet, the tuna fishing fleet that was basically run by a Chinese company.
• 14:01
  Speaker 0: And what was happening was there were people in Indonesia who were applying for office jobs, or what they thought were office jobs, who were then thrown on ships, their passports were taken away, and then they were essentially sent out to sea for years at a time under very bad conditions.
• 14:16
  Speaker 0: So it began as, I guess you say like a human rights story or angle.
• 14:21
  Speaker 0: But through the process of interviewing all those deck hands, it emerged that there is also an environmental story, which was this tuna fishing fleet was engaged in large-scale shark fin.
• 14:33
  Speaker 0: And so that became a second investigation that emerged out of it.
• 14:36
  Speaker 0: And as a result of that reporting, there were a bunch of things that happened, but eventually the company was sanctioned by the U.S.
• 14:44
  Speaker 0: Department of Treasury.
• 14:45
  Speaker 0: which was very significant at a time when it was working to expand its fishing fleet.
• 14:49
  Speaker 0: So it lost access to capital at that point.
• 14:52
  Speaker 0: Another example, again, from a couple of years ago, was from the Central African country of Gabon.
• 15:00
  Speaker 0: Gabon was part of the Congo Basin Rainforest.
• 15:04
  Speaker 0: And we had a little contributor who reported on this community that had their ancestral forest that depended on for generations.
• 15:12
  Speaker 0: And this forest was about to be logged by a foreign company.
• 15:18
  Speaker 0: And so we did reporting on sort of their struggle, and it caught the attention of the environment minister of Gabon.
• 15:26
  Speaker 0: And so he went and visited the site, and he was so impressed with what was going on there, they ended up revoking the permanent logging company and recognizing the community's rights to the forest.
• 15:40
  Speaker 0: And so this is important because most conservation in Gibraltar had been top-down.
• 15:44
  Speaker 0: It had become a source of conflict, whereas this was the first case where it had been a bottom-up community protected area that was being recognized.
• 15:53
  Speaker 0: So the first is an example of an investigation driving behavior changed by a company.
• 15:59
  Speaker 0: The second is an action by a government, which is essentially a solution to the story, which is helping recognize the protection of that land.
• 16:09
  Speaker 0: I have a lot of more examples, but I don't know how deep you want me to go on this.
• 16:29
  Speaker 0: I
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: think this idea of top-down versus bottoms-up is absolutely essential.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: I argued, hence my opening on the COP, too much of what's passed for our attempt in the environmental space globally has been top-down.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, but certainly both in the Congo Basin, as you just mentioned, and in the Amazon, where you also done a lot of reporting.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: What's missing is that bottoms up.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: And it seems to me that the work MongoDB is doing in both those places in particular is incredibly important.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: as people begin to recognize we really have to shift the vectors.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: If this is urgent, it's got to be urgent on the ground, not at lofty UN kind of meetings.
• 17:26
  Speaker 0: Yeah, I think one fundamental problem right now is that climate change has become very polarized at least in the context of the United States.
• 17:34
  Speaker 0: And so, you know, one of the reasons is that climate change is this big issue which requires the transformation of economic systems, of energy systems.
• 17:42
  Speaker 0: You know, it's a big issue that is also crushing for a lot of people because there's a sense of equating anxiety that, you know, like, it's a problem that's too big for me to take on.
• 17:52
  Speaker 0: Whereas the bottom-up approach feels more achievable.
• 17:58
  Speaker 0: So it also gives you a sense of momentum.
• 18:00
  Speaker 0: So the idea that you know, anyone can go out and clean up a creek and you can immediately see the difference.
• 18:06
  Speaker 0: So the fish come back, the water gets clear.
• 18:09
  Speaker 0: If you plant trees, you can hear the birds returning.
• 18:12
  Speaker 0: The ambient air temperature goes down.
• 18:15
  Speaker 0: It's also a nice place to be.
• 18:16
  Speaker 0: And so those kind of small victories tend to not be as polarizing, you know, they're cross cutting politically.
• 18:24
  Speaker 0: And it's a way to build momentum for systemic change.
• 18:27
  Speaker 0: And I think that's one of the problems.
• 18:29
  Speaker 0: that's with the UN process, that it is very top-down, you know, run to sovereignty issues.
• 18:34
  Speaker 0: It's, you know, people imposing their will on other people, whereas this bottom-up approach feels, especially at this moment in time, less politically divided and gives people a sense that they can actually do something to make a difference.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Well, indeed, your Gabon story is a perfect example
• 18:51
  Speaker 0: that
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: absent that reporting, absent that minister.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: showing up and actually looking around and beginning to understand the reality on
• 19:02
  Speaker 0: the ground,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: those trees aren't there anymore.
• 19:06
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
• 19:06
  Speaker 0: And so we had a series that is still ongoing actually in Indonesia, which looked at these very small community forestry projects.
• 19:15
  Speaker 0: And so they ended up doing over a hundred, essentially case studies or profiles on these communities.
• 19:20
  Speaker 0: And what was interesting was those, so out of those stories, communities would get contacted by other communities who wanted to learn how to do what they were doing.
• 19:32
  Speaker 0: And our journalists would get contacted as well.
• 19:33
  Speaker 0: So there's a way to spread these very localized ideas that had environmental benefits, but also livelihood benefits, direct peer-to-peer.
• 19:44
  Speaker 0: And so the journalism helped create those connections, which I found to be very interesting and also inspiring.
• 19:51
  Speaker 0: Purposeful?
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Did you intend that?
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: or is that... the unintended but positive consequence of some of the work.
• 19:59
  Speaker 0: Well, working in this space, you kind of know how things can end up happening.
• 20:03
  Speaker 0: So, I mean, there's a lot of serendipities.
• 20:05
  Speaker 0: It can't really predict what will happen.
• 20:07
  Speaker 0: But from patterns we'd seen before, we knew that elevating these stories could lead to replication of ideas.
• 20:16
  Speaker 0: So, let's say it wasn't the primary goal of the project.
• 20:19
  Speaker 0: We knew it could be an outcome of the project.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And let's shift a little bit to... to the environment.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: As you look around and we're nearing the end of twenty twenty five, what are the biggest changes you've seen?
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: You've been doing this now for a long time.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: You've immersed yourself in the global environment in ways that very few people can or choose to.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: What?
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: I guess two questions, both sort of trivial and I apologize.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: One is how much has changed?
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: And what are the big stories of the future?
• 20:57
  Speaker 0: Yeah, I mean, so there's actually been a lot of changes, both in the past, this is I started Mongo Bay in nineteen ninety nine, but also just the last five years.
• 21:06
  Speaker 0: So, you know, I think one of the big changes has been the availability of data and our capabilities are processing that data to have a much better sense of what's happening in the world.
• 21:19
  Speaker 0: So I like to say that we no longer have ignorance is an excuse.
• 21:22
  Speaker 0: But we can see what's happening.
• 21:24
  Speaker 0: So it becomes a political will.
• 21:26
  Speaker 0: Do we have the political will actually do something about it or are we just going to let it happen?
• 21:29
  Speaker 0: Because I think the best example is just like the satellite data.
• 21:32
  Speaker 0: So we have a much better sense of where forests are being cut down.
• 21:36
  Speaker 0: Will we do anything about it?
• 21:37
  Speaker 0: I don't know.
• 21:38
  Speaker 0: But we can't say that we don't know anymore.
• 21:40
  Speaker 0: So that's one of the major macro trends that's been going on.
• 21:45
  Speaker 0: Another specific to conservation has been recognition of other types of ways of managing land.
• 21:53
  Speaker 0: And so moving away from the pure top-down approach where it's either a government, a protected area, or international NGO coming in to manage a protected area, and recognition that, especially in places like the Amazon, that when local people's rights are recognized, there are benefits for climate and biodiversity, because those areas typically have lower rates of loss and degradation relative to unprotected areas, but even relative to officially recognized protected areas like national parks.
• 22:32
  Speaker 0: And so in the past ten years, there's been much more emphasis on helping indigenous communities in the Amazon get their rights recognized.
• 22:40
  Speaker 0: I mean, it goes beyond that, but it goes back to your opening, which was top down versus bottom up approaches.
• 22:49
  Speaker 0: Another big trend of late has been the degradation of the information ecosystem, where people don't necessarily know what's real or not real in terms of news or other types of information, and they may not care.
• 23:07
  Speaker 0: And so I think it's one thing to say that misinformation is a problem, but I think it's equally big a problem or even a bigger problem.
• 23:17
  Speaker 0: when people don't really care whether we're dealing with fashion information, if they just want to have information that fits their worldview or just want to be entertained.
• 23:25
  Speaker 0: And I think everyone who's listening to this would be aware of these issues in their own life, whether it's, you know, polarization or fake news or whatever that looks like.
• 23:33
  Speaker 0: And so navigating this is a very, is a huge challenge for sites around
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: the world.
• 23:39
  Speaker 0: And so, you know, certainly in Mongolia, we're trying to navigate it.
• 23:42
  Speaker 0: So those would be three areas I guess I would point to.
• 23:46
  Speaker 0: In terms of where we're going.
• 23:47
  Speaker 0: so one of One of the efforts at manga Bay that's I think gonna be really important for us is is making better use of data for Reporting and so we established what's called manga Bay data studios a way to organize this effort.
• 24:04
  Speaker 0: But the idea is is that there's more.
• 24:06
  Speaker 0: there's a proliferation of data sources out there And it's just very hard to turn that that data into actual information that reaches the right people at the right time.
• 24:16
  Speaker 0: And so can we develop the in-house expertise, the relationships and also the external expertise to do that reporting that's based off of primary satellite data or data that's emerging out of biocoustic networks, things of that nature.
• 24:32
  Speaker 0: And then a second major area we're looking into is the idea of reaching micro decision makers in information desert.
• 24:43
  Speaker 0: So what that means is these are people who are on the front lines, say a farmer in Nigeria or a fisherman in coastal Tanzania that are making decisions around, well, should I plant some trees or should I cut down a actor or a forest?
• 25:01
  Speaker 0: Should I consider closing a fishery?
• 25:04
  Speaker 0: Should I avoid clearing this mangrove forest?
• 25:07
  Speaker 0: And so a lot of these people do not speak the the languages that we primarily produce in Mongabay.
• 25:17
  Speaker 0: They may not have the best literacy skills.
• 25:19
  Speaker 0: They may not have the resources to use their data to access the internet or apps.
• 25:23
  Speaker 0: But because WhatsApp is subsidized in their country, WhatsApp is essentially a free platform for them.
• 25:29
  Speaker 0: So how do we reach those people?
• 25:30
  Speaker 0: And so we're looking at a combination of leveraging large language models with human editors as a way to transform information from say like a fifteen hundred word story in English about the livelihood benefits of a temporary fisheries closure into a ninety second audio message in Nigerian Pigeon or Swahili that is accessible to those communities.
• 26:00
  Speaker 0: And so we're excited about the possibilities that are being enabled by some of the technology developments that have happened over the past few years.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: It's ironic but accurate that you talk about the degradation of the information ecosystem at the exact same time that the technology indeed is making more information available.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: You can get access to satellite information easily.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: You can get almost unlimited data availability easily, but it does require both the effort on the one hand and the willingness on the other to use those sources in this case to inform your journalism.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: It is going back to the point about ground truth in that facts actually matter and you have access to more facts more easily than ever before in the history of information ecosystems.
• 26:53
  Speaker 0: Yeah, absolutely.
• 26:54
  Speaker 0: I mean, it's double-edged short.
• 26:55
  Speaker 0: There's more information than ever, but there's also more misinformation than ever.
• 27:00
  Speaker 0: And I think that's why Journalism is so important at this moment because you need someone to be able to distill that data into actual information, but also to understand what's real and what's not real and demonstrate the veracity of the information we're seeing.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: You mentioned before we started that you've just hired a, what I would call a picture editor.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: One of the things I love about Manga Bay is that you do use visuals.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: You have a bias towards great visuals.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: But again, it's one of those spaces where disinformation AI will now make it much easier to invent what everyone wants to invent in video or in still photos.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Same challenge.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: How do you maintain integrity?
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: It's this race from AI's negative capabilities and AI's positive capabilities.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: How do you as... as a publisher, as an editor, as a writer, because you do all of that.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: How do you, how do you please the AI frontier?
• 28:09
  Speaker 0: Yeah, I mean, it's a very tricky question that we're trying to navigate now.
• 28:14
  Speaker 0: So just in this month, OpenAI launched Sora, which allows anyone who has an account to create very realistic looking videos.
• 28:26
  Speaker 0: And so it's in proliferation of misleading videos that are now all over the internet.
• 28:31
  Speaker 0: I mean, just the other day, there was one about like a tiger in Bali.
• 28:34
  Speaker 0: And, you know, the average version sees that and it's kind of like grainy security camera footage or situation.
• 28:42
  Speaker 0: But we know right off the bat that there are no tigers in Bali.
• 28:44
  Speaker 0: You know, they went extinct, you know, last century.
• 28:47
  Speaker 0: You know, they're likely to be escaped tiger, but this looks like a, you know, a fake video.
• 28:54
  Speaker 0: And so essentially the way that we have to approach from the newsroom, is you can't trust any video taken at face value alone.
• 29:03
  Speaker 0: So you have to actually now do diligence to understand what the parameters around that video and what it's purporting to show.
• 29:11
  Speaker 0: It's making our lives more complex and more difficult because it just adds a level of rigor and fact checking on every video now that any video can essentially be fabricated.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: On the other hand, I have a journalist friend in Latin America who makes the case that properly trained investigative journalists can in fact track down the details on anything.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: That given there are digital footprints that can allow a good journalist to actually verify truth or falsity.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: But as you just said, it's expensive, it's time consuming.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: It requires a whole nother layer of training in addition to all the other skills that a journalist has to have to create great journalists.
• 30:01
  Speaker 0: Yes.
• 30:02
  Speaker 0: The other aspect of this is there's like a flood of fake videos out there.
• 30:06
  Speaker 0: And so there's also the degree to which journalists feel like they have a responsibility to counter the fake video saying, you know, doing a story about why this video is fake.
• 30:17
  Speaker 0: And then will anyone actually read that story?
• 30:19
  Speaker 0: So yeah, it's becoming more complicated.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: As you look forward, you have all this technology, you have this amazing wind in your sails in terms of information availability.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: You've built this platform, which is global and is becoming increasingly global, and AI is allowing that as well, your example of translation into any language you want.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: If you could get it into the years where the eyes of the viewer.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Sounds like this is positioned, that Mongabe is positioned beyond well, that it is... You've got a future here that you're at the right moment, the right time, the right resources, and God knows people need this information.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: Am I too optimistic on your behalf?
• 31:10
  Speaker 0: Well, I think in general, I would agree with what you're saying.
• 31:13
  Speaker 0: I mean, it is challenging, but we have navigated... the past decade, which has not necessarily been the best period for journalism.
• 31:23
  Speaker 0: In the past decade, we've grown from probably less than ten staff to her twenty-five.
• 31:28
  Speaker 0: And more importantly, I think the quality of our journalism has significantly increased during that period of time.
• 31:33
  Speaker 0: So I'm pretty bullish in terms of our outlook.
• 31:35
  Speaker 0: I feel like we're just barely scratching the surface on a lot of the issues and geographies that we currently are in.
• 31:42
  Speaker 0: So I see a lot of upside, but it's not going to be easy.
• 31:46
  Speaker 0: And I think AI is going to be very complicated.
• 31:50
  Speaker 0: So just navigating that situation.
• 31:53
  Speaker 0: But yeah, I mean, I'm optimistic for Manga Bay.
• 31:56
  Speaker 0: And I mean, I'm not sure how I feel about journalism generally, because I think it's a very challenging moment.
• 32:03
  Speaker 0: But I feel like we've built a resilient system that spans borders.
• 32:09
  Speaker 0: And our iterative approach allows us to be experimental when learned.
• 32:13
  Speaker 0: quickly from mistakes and then the adaptive.
• 32:16
  Speaker 0: So, yeah, I guess it's all to say that I'm looking forward the next five years, despite the challenges.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: And I've got to say, as someone who consumes an enormous amount of journalism, I wish that other spaces, the political, the social, the military, the foreign policy, that there was a manga bay for each of those.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Because I think the approach is far more robust, resilience is a good word, but far more robust as well, and recognizes that it's about ground truthing.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: Getting the ground truth right
• 32:52
  Speaker 0: allows
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: stuff to be built that's not otherwise being, stories to be built,
• 32:57
  Speaker 0: stories to be told.
• 32:58
  Speaker 0: Well, it's very nice to hear.
• 33:00
  Speaker 0: Yeah, we're sort of, we sort of have our nose to the grindstones.
• 33:02
  Speaker 0: We're now, say, paying attention to the broader ecosystem as much, but it's, it feels like a real endorsement.
• 33:08
  Speaker 0: for you to say that we wish there was a Manga Bay equivalent in those other spaces too.
• 33:13
  Speaker 0: So thank you for that.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: I'm just trying to encourage whoever's listening to say, hey, I could do that too.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's going to happen, but Rhett, thank you very much for the conversation.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: As I said, I think Manga Bay is one of those essential bits, at least in my information
• 33:30
  Speaker 0: ecosystem.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: A bit is too small a word, essential foundations of my information ecosystem.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: I urge you to keep doing the voodoo you're doing.
• 33:41
  Speaker 0: Well, thank you so much for having me in that great conversation.
• 33:43
  Speaker 0: I appreciate it.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this episode of New Thinking for a New World.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: I'm Alan Stoga, podcast host, and I look forward to your joining our next conversation.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: Remember, tell us what you think at tellbergfoundation.org.