Mahdi Garba

@RestofWorld will publish its final stories at the end of January. I’ve been sitting with this news for a few days, and I keep thinking about how personal this project was for me. When Sophie Schmidt asked me to help build Rest of World, it felt like a chance to fix something I’d been frustrated by for my whole career: seeing the parts of the world I come from covered as an afterthought. I was there at the beginning, with a handful of hires and a bet that sounded obvious to us and strange to almost everyone else: that most of the world’s internet users live outside the West, and their stories deserved to be covered with the same depth, ambition, and care. We didn’t want to cover “emerging markets.” We wanted to cover the people who were building, hacking, gig-working, organizing, and surviving through technology in countries like Nepal, where I grew up. We hired reporters who lived those stories rather than parachuted into them. We edited from the assumption that a delivery rider in Lagos was as important a protagonist as a CEO in San Francisco. The thousands of stories Rest of World published helped change how a lot of newsrooms think about who tech journalism is for. Media ventures end for many reasons, and most of them are economic. That doesn’t change what Rest of World was able to prove: the audience was real, the journalism mattered, and the model of covering the world from the world actually works. Thank you to Sophie for making the publication possible for all these years; to Christine Glancey, Michael Donohoe, Michael Zelenko, Itika Sharma Punit, Rina Chandran, Indranil Ghosh, and the team for carrying it this far; and to every reporter, editor, designer, and producer who passed through Rest of World and made it what it was. A special shout-out to Eli Berger, who’s been a rock for Rest of World since the beginning, navigating us through Covid-19, messy international hiring, legal threats, reporter safety, and a dozen other things. The publication’s archive is a gift. I encourage everyone to read it. And if you’re hiring, hire Rest of World’s journalists. You won’t find a better group of people.