Brooke Shanesy, founder and CEO of Rest of World Sophie Schmidt
Sophie Schmidt has pledged $60 million to finance Rest of World over a ten-year period.
Internal strife over the editorial process and personnel departures, according to sources.
With news partnerships and China coverage, the journal is looking to the future.
It is been a year and a half since Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, founded Rest of World, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to covering global technology issues that aren’t covered by mainstream media. Rest of World faced early growing pains after being thrust into the uncertain early days of the epidemic, when global travel came to a standstill, according to talks with nine former workers and individuals engaged with the project, as well as internal emails seen by Insider. According to the sources, disagreements over editing methods and goals have caused some early personnel to leave the non-profit.
The concern for some engaged with Rest of World remains: how can the magazine stand out in a crowded technological media landscape?
Schmidt has stated that she intends to invest $60 million in the Rest of the World over the next ten years.
From Laurene Powell Jobs’ Atlantic to Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post to Marc Benioff’s Time, Schmidt has joined the expanding trend of tech money-backed news publications. Schmidt, rather than inheriting a heritage brand, set out to create her own. She told The Wall Street Journal last year that she had spent $6 million from a family trust to self-fund a non-profit with a staff of around 30 people, with ambitions to spend $60 million on the site over the next decade.