Rest of World — rëşt ộf wŏrld

New York City, USA (headquarters) · Reporters in Berlin, Hong Kong, Bangalore, and international locations · Rest of World Media Inc. · 501(c)(3) private operating foundation

Overview

Rest of World is a nonprofit international technology journalism publication founded in 2019 and launched in May 2020, dedicated to covering the impact of technology on people, communities, and economies in the parts of the world that Western tech media consistently overlooks: sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Pacific. It was founded by Sophie Schmidt — whose background spans Afghanistan's MOBY Media Group, public policy roles at Uber across San Francisco and Europe, an MBA from Stanford, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in Islamic Studies from Princeton — with an explicit ambition to fill what she identified as a critical information gap. "There are three or four billion people," she said at launch in September 2020, "who live in markets that are deemed not important enough to address, so there is just a huge gap in understanding what is going on in the rest of the world." Rest of World is operated by Rest of World Media Inc., a 501(c)(3) private operating foundation incorporated in Delaware in April 2019, with a subsidiary, Rest of World Media International LLC, registered in Kenya. Schmidt has committed to spending $60 million on the publication over its first decade, with the majority of funding from the Schmidt Family Foundation. The publication does not carry advertising and does not use a subscription model; all content is freely accessible.

Founding and the Information Gap Argument

Schmidt's case for founding Rest of World rested on a specific observation, developed during years of working in technology and policy across countries including Afghanistan, China, the UAE, South Africa, and Myanmar: technology does not manifest the same way everywhere. The apps people use, the platforms that dominate, the ways digital payment displaces cash, the forms that surveillance takes, the labor conditions that gig economy platforms produce — all of these differ enormously between a user in Lagos, one in Dhaka, one in São Paulo, and one in San Francisco. Western technology journalism, built around Silicon Valley and its self-portrait, was systematically missing these differences. The stories it told were not wrong, exactly — but they were describing a fraction of the digital world and presenting it as the whole.

Rest of World launched in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Schmidt later described as an inadvertent demonstration of the thesis: the moment the entire world was suddenly forced to depend on its specific technological environment for survival, the differences between those environments became visible and consequential in ways they had not been before. "People from Hong Kong to Harare are more dependent than ever on the particular tech environment they inhabit," she wrote in the publication's first editorial. "Those differences will shape how every society survives and emerges from this crisis." The timing — arriving at exactly the moment when the non-Western digital world became undeniable as a subject — helped establish the publication's relevance before it had published more than a handful of stories.

Editorial Approach and Local Journalism Model

Rest of World's editorial model is built on a specific rejection of parachute journalism — the practice of flying a Western reporter into an unfamiliar country for a few days to produce a story that treats that country as exotic terrain. The publication's stated approach: hire reporters and editors from the regions they cover, treat local journalists as full reporters and not merely fixers, and produce journalism in which local knowledge is the credential rather than a supplement to Western expertise. By 2022, 90% of Rest of World's articles were reported by journalists on the ground, and the publication worked with more than 250 freelance journalists worldwide. The publication's offices are in New York, but its reporters are distributed across Berlin, Hong Kong, Bangalore, and other international cities, with the freelance network extending its reach across dozens of additional countries.

The editorial frame is explicitly the accountability journalism of technology: holding companies, executives, and policymakers accountable for the impact of their decisions on the people using — and living under — the technology they produce. A recurring methodology is the cross-border comparative: finding the same pattern in multiple countries simultaneously and documenting how a product feature, regulatory decision, or platform policy in one market creates consequences that ripple globally. The 2024 National Magazine Award-winning reporting that established Rest of World's design reputation — "40 Companies That Are Beating the West," "How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes," and "China, the World's Shopping Cart" — illustrates this method: placing non-Western actors at the center of technology narratives rather than treating them as footnotes to a Silicon Valley story.

Coverage Beats

Rest of World's core beats include the gig economy and labor conditions for platform workers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the global electric vehicle revolution and the battery supply chains that power it; Chinese technology companies and their expansion beyond China's borders; artificial intelligence in global markets, including the ways AI systems produce and amplify stereotypes about non-Western populations; internet shutdowns and government suppression of connectivity (tracked through a regular shutdown database); social media platform policy and its uneven application across geographies; digital payments and financial inclusion in markets where mobile money has outpaced banking; and surveillance infrastructure in the Global South. The publication has covered the internet shutdown landscape with particular depth: its 2025 internet shutdowns report documented Myanmar with 95 recorded shutdown events — the highest of any country for the second consecutive year — and documented 14 instances of satellite internet services such as Starlink being blocked across seven countries. The publication maintains an investigative track: in January 2025, Maryam Saleh — formerly of The Intercept — joined as Rest of World's first Investigations Editor.

Partnership journalism has extended Rest of World's reach further than its staff size would suggest. The publication maintains formal editorial partnerships with The Caravan in India and Animal Político in Mexico, and has collaborated with other international outlets for specific investigations. Its 2024 reporting on Meta's disregard of local laws and its own community standards across at least 13 countries — a major data-driven investigation — exemplified the cross-border accountability model the publication was built to execute.

Founding Editor-in-Chief: Anup Kaphle

Anup Kaphle joined Rest of World as its founding executive editor in 2020, having previously worked at The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, and The Kathmandu Post. Born in Nepal, he brought to Rest of World both the editorial experience of major Western newsrooms and the lived perspective of a journalist who had covered technology and politics from outside the Western center of gravity. Over six years as editor-in-chief he built the publication's editorial operations from scratch — a team that grew from around 30 employees at launch to a global newsroom recognized with the National Magazine Award, Society for News Design honors, and finalist positions in General Excellence. In March 2026, Kaphle announced he would be stepping down by the end of April, returning to Nepal to be closer to his family. "We covered many of these changes not as curiosities or footnotes to a Western story, but as the story itself," he wrote in his departure announcement. A search for Rest of World's next editor-in-chief was underway as of May 2026.

Funding, Governance, and Business Model

Rest of World is funded entirely by philanthropy and does not carry advertising or charge subscription fees. Schmidt has stated a commitment to spending $60 million on the publication over its first decade. The Schmidt Family Foundation is the primary funder; additional major grants have come from the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, Luminate (an entity of the Omidyar Group), and the Warsh-Mott Legacy. A $200,000 sponsorship from Luminate in 2024 specifically supported Rest of World's coverage of platform and AI effects on global elections — a project covering a year in which more than half the world's population faced national elections. The board of directors includes Schmidt as founder and publisher; Raju Narisetti, a global publishing executive at McKinsey; Duncan Clark, founder and chairman of BDA; Niki Christoff, founder and CEO of Christoff & Co.; and Saad Mohseni, a director of Moby Group. Schmidt was named a 2024 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2025, Emily Tracy joined as Rest of World's first Chief Development Officer, signaling a move toward broadening the publication's philanthropic revenue base.

Access and Usage

All Rest of World journalism is freely accessible without paywall or registration at restofworld.org. The publication is organized by geographic beat and topic, and maintains an archive of charts and data visualizations at restofworld.org/charts. An "Inside Rest of World" section at restofworld.org/inside publishes editorial notes, staff announcements, and transparency reporting on the publication's operations and experiments. Press and partnership inquiries can be directed through the contact information on the About page. Rest of World maintains active presences on X/Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Bluesky.