Mongabay India won an excellence in audio reporting award recently from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA). The award was for the limited series podcast Wild Frequencies.
SOPA, which promotes best practices and excellence in journalism, announced the winners of its 2025 Awards of Editorial Excellence during a ceremony in Hong Kong on June 26.
Wild Frequencies, a three-episode series that follows researchers in India studying animal sounds to better understand wildlife, is hosted by Mongabay India’s Kartik Chandramouli and Mongabay’s Shreya Dasgupta. It features sound design and original music by Abhijit Shylanath.
SOPA shared the judges’ comments on the series: “With a rich audio-scape and creative sound design, rigorous reporting and engaging storytelling, these reports from the field (and forests and wetlands) around India offer listeners a deeper understanding of how the sounds [are] made by creatures in the natural world, and what those creatures and their bioacoustics can tell us about whether an ecosystem is healthy or imperiled.”
The series also won “Best Science and Medical” podcast at the Publisher Podcast Awards in June and the “Best Produced Show” in the science category for the India Audio Summit & Awards 2025.
In 2023, Mongabay won SOPA’s Excellence in Bahasa Indonesian News Reporting Award for the story ‘The promise was a lie’: How Indonesian villagers lost their cut of the palm oil boom, which was a collaboration with The Gecko Project and BBC News.
Find the Wild Frequencies episodes here:
Episode 1: “Find Them” — introduces the science of bioacoustics and how it is useful for identifying specific species of birds, bats and other wildlife. It can also be used to count species including dolphins, porpoises and wolves.
Episode 2: “Know Them” — explores what we can learn from elephant and cricket sounds. Calls of such species help us understand how they communicate with each other to share information, work together and even find mates.
Episode 3: “Us and Them” — explores how changes in animal sounds can be an indicator of shifts in animal behavior, especially when wildlife face altered habitats due to human activities.
Follow Mongabay India’s Everything Environment podcast on Apple and Spotify. You can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay India website.
With the recent addition of the French-language podcast, Planète Mongabay, Mongabay now offers podcasts in four languages along with English, Spanish and Indonesian.
