This nonprofit aims to fill the gap in investigative journalism about wildlife

Rachael Bale is an award-winning journalist specialising in wildlife and environmental issues. She is the co-founder of Wildlife Investigative Reporting Enterprise (WIRE), a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet focused on wildlife crime and environmental exploitation. 

Alongside her co-founders, Oliver Payne and Rene Ebersole, Bale is working to fill the gap left by legacy news organisations that have scaled back on in-depth environmental reporting. WIRE aims to produce two major investigations per year, partnering with media outlets like Rolling Stone to reach broader audiences and bring attention to critical but often overlooked issues. The team leverages their extensive network of photographers, researchers, and conservationists to produce multimedia-rich stories that combine traditional journalism with visual storytelling. 

With a background that includes leading the Animals beat at National Geographic as being its executive editor, Bale has published extensively on wildlife trafficking and conservation. Her work has taken her deep into the illegal trade of endangered species, from the surge of illegal trade in jaguar parts in South America to exposing the smuggling of cheetah cubs from Somaliland to wealthy buyers in the Middle East. 

In one of her notable investigations into pangolin trafficking, Bale revealed how the relentless demand for their scales in traditional Chinese medicine has made them the most heavily trafficked nonhuman mammals in the world. From the rescue efforts in Zimbabwe to the transcontinental smuggling networks funnelling pangolin scales from Africa to Asia, her investigation shed light on the urgent fight to save a species on the brink of extinction. 

Her investigations not only highlight the urgent need for conservation. They also expose the intricate, transnational networks that drive wildlife crime and the illicit trade in endangered species and their parts. Bale’s reporting has earned her two Livingston Award nominations and a reputation for shedding light on some of the most pressing and underreported environmental crimes of our time. 

I recently spoke to Bale for this interview piece. We discussed her investigative process, the challenges of reporting on wildlife trafficking, and the broader implications of her work for global conservation efforts. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Q. What inspired you and your co-founders to launch WIRE? 

A. What inspired us was our shared experience and passion for investigative environmental journalism. Ollie and I had worked at National Geographic, and Rene had also conducted investigations for the same publication. While other publications touched on these topics, none were approaching them as thoroughly as National Geographic. Over the years, though, priorities have changed and they’re no longer doing those types of stories. But these stories needed to be told and nobody else was doing them.  

Q. What are the challenges posed by this kind of reporting and how are you addressing these challenges? 

A. There’s a reason nobody’s doing these kinds of stories. Investigative journalism is expensive to begin with. When you are sending people into the field, you’re sending them into remote areas for extended periods of time, so you have to think about security, travel, health and safety, and then there’s also the legal risks. So at WIRE we’re starting with the goal of doing two investigations a year, and each investigation would be published in partnership with a major media partner.  

Q. How does WIRE plan to reach audiences beyond people interested in these issues?

A. We want to partner with news organisations to get these stories in front of people who may not have ever thought about wildlife trafficking or environmental crime. For our first investigation we are partnering with Rolling Stone, a publication with a big audience that’s interested in good storytelling. Our goal is to introduce a new topic to this audience, and potentially get them to care. 

Q. How do you ensure that your stories resonate with audiences who may feel disconnected to these topics?

A. We think of these stories as crime stories which are character-driven. Everybody responds to a good story. If you do a good job in telling a story, then you can tell people anything, and they’ll like it. That is why we plan to invest so much time reporting in the field, getting good photographs, maps, and graphics. All these elements that the audience can engage with.  

Q. What techniques or formats is WIRE experimenting with? 

A. We are print journalists. Writing is what we do best. But from our experience at National Geographic we know that it is also visual storytelling, and not just words, what drives great stories. So we are working with a network of photographers we worked with at National Geographic. 

One thing we will do with all the investigation is creating a sizzle reel [a short promotional video]. Not every investigation will necessarily result in a documentary. But we are investing so much in each of them that we want to make sure that every story has the potential to become a documentary film as well. By building in the sizzle reel we are able to collect enough video to use for social media posts and platforms such as YouTube too. 

Q. Investigative journalism can be resource-intensive and risky. How will you be addressing those challenges? 

A. We are building this from scratch. We’re journalists. So learning how to do all of this from the ground up has been a big challenge. We are a nonprofit and any nonprofit will tell you that nobody wants to fund overheads. Nobody wants to fund boring stuff like bank fees or administration fees. They just want to fund investigations, which I get. That’s the exciting part. You want to fund the actual work, but the actual work can’t happen unless all that overheads are met. Trying to fill that funding gap is a big challenge.  

Q. With many legacy media organizations cutting back on in-depth reporting, how do you see the role of independent investigative outlets like yours? 

A. Investigative journalism has been hit really hard and wildlife journalism has never been a priority of mainstream media outlets. People still tend to think of these as stories about just animals, but they’re not. If we at WIRE can do the heavy lifting for these stories and then go to a media partner and say we have this amazing investigation, then the risk is so much smaller for them because they haven’t diverted their own reporters to work on one story for an entire year. That also gives us an opportunity to show other newsrooms that wildlife reporting does matter.  

Q. How do you fund your investigations? 

A. Right now we have the one investigation underway, which is partially funded, and we have several proposals for our next investigations, but we are not going to get started on those until we know we can secure a good chunk of funding.   

We are having a lot of meetings with foundations, both those supporting independent journalism and those supporting wildlife protection and animal issues. We have also tried a few crowdfunding campaigns which gave us enough to keep us going. We are trying to cultivate relationships with individual donors and working towards hiring a development consultant right now. Raising money is a very specific profession that we do not have a background in. So we would like to pay somebody to help us with that. 

Q. Have you thought about selling stories to media organisations? 

A. We are a nonprofit, so there are certain legal boundaries we have to stick within. A big thing we are grappling with right now is how to handle intellectual property rights between us and our media partners. This will vary depending on who our partner is and what our relationship is like. But ideally, the more intellectual property rights we can maintain for ourselves, the more opportunities there are. 

Q. A good story needs a great character. How do you find these characters?  

A. This is partly why investigative journalism takes so long. You have this great issue you want to dive into, but finding the actual character can be hard. So it is all about working through our source networks, whether they are researchers in the field, conservationists or journalists on the ground we’re partnering with. Sometimes you don’t have a character, but you just go out and start reporting, and then meet that person. So it is about shoe-leather reporting. Getting out there and meeting people until you find the right person.  

Q. Investigative journalism is time-intensive and often financially unsustainable for freelancers. How does WIRE structure compensation to ensure freelancers are fairly paid? 

A. For a freelance journalist it’s almost never really worth doing investigative stories because they’re going to spend way more time investigating than the money they’re going to make back. But that’s actually something we want to do differently. We think it is important to pay our freelancers an actual living wage for the work they do. We know an investigative story takes a year or more to do, and $1 a word, or even $2 a word is not going to make that feasible.  

We want to work with people who have the stories and know how to find them, and not just with those who can afford to make a loss. So we are thinking of building into our model a kind of fellowship model, where you can tell a freelance journalist, “Here is this chunk of money, spend the next six or 12 months and do the story. That will actually make it worthwhile to dedicate that time to doing the story and not thinking about all the other freelance work they have to do to pay their bills. Again, that is idealistic and expensive but we think we can do it.   

Q. What advice would you give to a journalist who wants to get into wildlife and environmental investigations? 

A. The key is to figure out how to connect those stories to the rule of law, to society, to corruption, to economic development. I want to live in a world where people report on wildlife because they care about wildlife in and of itself, but that’s not the world we live in right now. It’s much easier to convince an editor when you want to do a story about an ivory smuggling ring at airport customs allowing a ton of ivory to leave the airport on a regular basis than it is to just pitch a direct story about elephant poaching.  

You should approach wildlife crime and environmental crime the same way you approach drug trafficking or human trafficking. We don’t have to justify those types of stories to our editors. Hopefully one day we’ll be in a place where wildlife trafficking falls into that category. In the meantime, thinking about wildlife trafficking as another type of organised crime helps reframe the story in a way that caters to audiences who aren’t necessarily interested in animals.

Q. Out of the dozens of investigations you’ve conducted, do you have a favorite story?

A. The story I am most proud of is the last feature story I did for National Geographic about cheetah cub trafficking through the Horn of Africa. I liked that story because it had all of the elements of a good story. The trafficking is happening in the Horn of Africa, the buyers are in the Gulf countries and the whole phenomenon is driven by social media because people want to post pictures of themselves with their cheetahs. 

As far as impact goes, when I reported that story in Somaliland, their government was very invested in trying to stop cheetah trafficking, and so we were able to have a lot of access to military operations. That really helped us tell the story. And cheetah cubs are cute and a good poster animal for wildlife trafficking. You can’t look at a cheetah cub and not yield something.