A conversation with Rest of World editor-in-chief Anup Kaphle

Most people in the world live in what we in the west sometimes dismissively call the “rest of the world.” Depending on where you live, “the rest” probably includes parts, if not all, of Latin America, Africa, and the vast majority of Asia. Much like the tendency of Americans to call the champions of their sports leagues “world champions,” the word “world” is never what it seems.

Except when it is.

Founded as a non-profit by Sophie Schmidt in 2020, Rest of World is meant to challenge the “expectations about whose experiences with technology matter,” as its mission states. With a global editorial team led by today’s guest Anup Kaphle, Rest of World’s emphasis on the technological transformation of the daily lives of billions of people is eye-opening, educational, entertaining, and fills in the gaps in our general understanding of how technology is used everywhere. When it won a National Magazine Award last year, one sensed that it had finally arrived to a broader audience.

The rest of the world is a big place, perhaps too big for a paper magazine. That’s why Rest of World is digital.

Those in the “west” would be better served by understanding it. Because everything and everyone is, ultimately, connected.

Arjun Basu: So tell everyone about the story of Rest of World.

Anup Kaphle: The story of Rest of World. So the Rest of World is a not-for-profit publication that was founded in 2019. The brain behind the publication is Sophie Schmidt. Sophie does not come from a media background. She actually comes from a tech background. And for those who don’t know, she’s the daughter of former Google executive, Eric Schmidt.

In various conversations during the course of our interview Sophie talked about how she realized that while working and living outside of the US, she realized that technology manifests itself very differently in different places around the world, right? And that the so-called “universal values” that so many Silicon Valley companies hard code into their products aren’t really universal at all. So she started scoping the project. She started speaking to people who were working in global tech, who were in media, both in and outside of New York.

And then towards the end of 2019, I had the opportunity to speak with Sophie. I was in Kathmandu at the time leading a national newspaper. And then the idea and the ethos behind the publication really spoke to me. So I came on as the first executive editor to help launch the publication. And we officially went live in May 2020, right in the middle of COVID.

Arjun Basu: Now, when you say that tech is used or works differently in other places, give me an example. I think I know what you mean, but give our listeners an example of what you mean.

Anup Kaphle: Basically, there are unintended consequences to having a technology. So how you may use a Facebook for social connections here in the West, versus someone in Dhaka, using Facebook as a marketplace to sell parrots or pigeons, right? Or to sell clothes out of their living room.

And I think most of these technologies, especially those that are coming out of the Silicon Valley are, they’re launched with one intention, but people find various use cases, depending on their needs, depending on their communities, depending on those ecosystems, that’s what we meant. And they also have unintended consequences. I think Myanmar is a very good example of what happens when you launch a product without really thinking about users and how they would end up.

Arjun Basu: That’s when I stopped using Facebook after their failure.

Anup Kaphle: You were early to end. I stopped using it when I moved back home in 2018.

Arjun Basu: I agree that Silicon Valley works one way, and much of the world works another. But it’s ironic when you consider so many people from the rest of the world actually work in Silicon Valley.

Anup Kaphle: Yes. They work as individuals. And then I think there are larger corporate goals, company’s goals, vision, mission. And I think, people bring their values to them, but not everybody can think about how it’s going to be used back home, for example. And we can say this for a lot of Indian entrepreneurs, or Indian developers, who work in Silicon Valley.

Arjun Basu: So you have a journalism background. So what is your story?

Anup Kaphle: My story—how far do I go back?

Arjun Basu: I’m not saying when you were born or anything….

Anup Kaphle: Yeah. Yeah. I was born in Nepal, which I think is important. I was born in Nepal and I came to the US for college. I came here when I was 18 or 19 and I went to a very small school in Tennessee, studied English and journalism—against the desires of my parents, who wanted me to be an engineer, which is what every South Asian story feels like. And during college I did a bunch of internships.

I was the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, which is where I really learned to write both news and investigative and essay style like reporting. Then I did some internships at Newsweek International, which was a solid, real magazine at that point. And Forbes.

I went to Columbia Journalism School to study journalism. At that time digital media was called “new media.” This was 2007. And my first job out of grad school was for the Atlantic, which was figuring out the magazine’s digital transition. I was mostly working on researching new platforms, ideas for the Atlantic to launch, either as a part of its main magazine or as standalone new entities.

I helped launch the food vertical while I was there a separate website that aggregated opinions and ideas journalism called “Atlantic Ideas,” which doesn’t exist right now. And then we did a lot of leg work for what eventually became Quartz. But I also did a lot of reporting in my free time.

I was very much interested in international reporting since I was very young. I thought I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So while I was at the Atlantic, I embedded with the British forces in Afghanistan. And I wrote for the Atlantic, for the Weekly Standard. I did some radio reporting for the CBC and published in the National, because I had the opportunity to embed with the Canadian soldiers in Kandahar as well. So that was of interest to the national media in Canada.

About two years later, I joined the Washington Post, where I was mostly focused on the digital side again, and I was helping our international stories find online audiences. I continued to do my own reporting there as well. I applied for grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, among others.

And after about six years at the Post, I switched gears and joined BuzzFeed News as an editor. And that was really like the pivotal moment for me in terms of wanting to be a journalist, wanting to be a reporter/writer, if you will, and really like switching track and moving into editing.

I was a deputy world editor on BuzzFeed’s news desk, which was like just becoming a powerhouse after BuzzFeed had become this viral website that everybody was coming to know. And I edited phone correspondents who were based anywhere, like Turkey and Mexico and Senegal. I worked there for a couple of years and then moved back to New York and was briefly the executive editor for Roads & Kingdoms.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard of Roads & Kingdoms—fantastic magazine that covers stories at the intersection of food, travel, and international reporting. And after Anthony Bourdain—who was a supporter of the publication—passed, I moved. I decided I’d move back home to Nepal.

I’d been on-and-off living in the US for such a long time, never intended that to happen, and I really wanted to give back to the place that I had come from. So I moved back in 2018 and became the editor-in-chief of a national daily called the Kathmandu Post, the largest English daily at the time, and was again, once again, back into the daily journalism, and that’s when I got in touch with Sophie and decided I’d move back to New York to launch Rest of World.

Arjun Basu: So you said, Sophie had been traveling or living abroad or whatever and saw something was missing. The mission statement for Rest of World says it “challenges the expectations about whose experiences with technology matter.” The word ‘matter’ is really interesting there. What does that mean? What is the logic of that?

Anup Kaphle: The logic of that is to really frontload our reporting and our stories to highlight how people are using technology and what that impact looks like to people who are living in these places that we call “rest of world.” Obviously, the story behind our name is that “rest of world” is a term that’s used by a lot of corporations in the West, which means “everyone else.”

And we wanted to embrace that name. There's this type of disregard for billions of people who are living in the West and there’s often this Western-centric worldview that ignores, sometimes intentionally, a lot of the insights, the opportunities, the experiences of people living in those places. And we want it to be a voice for those people.

Arjun Basu: When I think about technology and the “rest of the world,” I think about all the steps that the rest of the world skipped. Television is a perfect example. A lot of parts in the world have had television, or like the television as we consider it, for a very short period of time: they went straight from having nothing to streaming and having a billion channels. I just think about how people pay for things in India. Everyone has that account. And I think Americans always find that everywhere they go, the tech is actually more convenient than what they have. And that’s not really what you’re about, but that’s, I think, part of the story too. Look at all these things that are happening and the consequences, but also the opportunities, that people in the rest of the world do have because of tech.

Anup Kaphle: I think when I talk about consequences, it’s not just like writing about the negative consequences. It’s really writing about the opportunities and the solutions that people are finding. I am an optimist. I often talk about how my parents use technology, right?

I was talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago, and I thought about when I first came to Tennessee as a student. I was paying $5 for a calling card that would allow me to call my parents back home for eight minutes. So I would call them maybe every three months or four months. Living as a student, I didn't have a lot of money.

And I remember when Skype came. And I think Nepal was one of those countries where you still had to pay 33 cents or something, but it made it much simpler, much cheaper in the beginning. And then obviously afterwards, parents had their accounts and you could do like these free video calls.

And during COVID when my daughter was born, we live-streamed a Hindu priest in my hometown for a name-giving ceremony that Hindus have for children. And we live-streamed a priest in the middle of COVID. It’s just a very small example of how far technology has gone even in our lifetime and where it fits into people’s lives, right? And that this priest has figured out a way to make money, and I could, like, send him money directly from New York for providing this service that I wouldn’t have had if there was no technology.

Arjun Basu: Another thing you say on the website is “we connect the dots across a rapidly evolving digital world.” That’s a good example of dots being connected. But what do people, in the West, and I know all, not all of your readers are in the West, but a large number are, what do they not know about how people use technology in the rest of the world?

Anup Kaphle: I think one of the things that people don’t realize is that there is a lot of problem-solving people are trying to do with technology. There was the story that we’d done a few years ago from French Polynesia, and when we think about e-commerce delivery, which is technology, right? That’s how we receive packages and stuff. There was no Amazon, no Alibaba in this place. So a group of locals saw all of this stuff that they were missing. They needed to figure out how to build this whole apparatus on their own.

So they came together and they started to build their own kind of, like, online shipping service that was done through boats. And so people take these ideas and try to solve the problems that they have in their communities. There’s a lot of inspiration that comes from how technology is used in other places. But there is also really thinking about, How does this help my community?

Another really good example is In India, there is a service called Paytm and what Paytm did is obviously, you can transfer money, make payments and stuff through Paytm. Actually, like whenever I go to India, I'm surprised how debit cards or credit cards don’t really work in a lot of places.

What they did was they worked with a lot of these local vendors who would otherwise work in cash and a lot of people who don’t have education. So they started making these sound boxes. So whenever a transaction was done, it would say in India that X amount was received and that the transaction is confirmed.

So there was very little that needed to be done outside of it. So I think a lot of people here don’t quite understand that you may build something here, or something may come from here, that is intended for one purpose, but people find these really creative ways to fill the gaps in their needs and solve their own problems using those tech.

Arjun Basu: So map out how you find stories, how you come up with stories, where your writers are. Because they’re everywhere, right?

Anup Kaphle: Yeah, our writers are everywhere. So we have a very small team. We have about 35 to 38 full time staff members, which includes audience operations, and then the core editorial team is about 45 people, which includes regional editors who are based in the regions that we cover. And then we have at least one full-time reporter. But we also have a pool of contributing reporters around the world.

So it’s largely also a freelance contributor-based system. We have beats, coverage areas, that we work on. So our editors are constantly looking for ideas from people to work directly with the freelance reporters, receive commissions, and there are several layers of editing.

I think one of the challenges for us is because we’re based on this model where we really want to do reporting from the ground and mostly local reporters and local editors. We actually have a cheat sheet that we give to a lot of freelance reporters. It may include anything from “please save all your notes, all your recording,” because those cultures don’t really exist in a lot of these places that we’re reporting on.

And we do fact checking for a lot of our stories, especially if they’re sensitive or they are long-form features. And typically, we publish five-to-six stories a week at the moment.

Arjun Basu: And where are your readers?

Anup Kaphle: Our readers are primarily in the West. Most of them are in the US. And then our second biggest readership is in India. I think that’s partly true for a lot of publications, but primarily more so for us, given the topic that we cover. We see a lot of engagement on discussion groups that have Indian readers. And then the rest of it is a mix between the UK and, occasionally, depending on the topic of the story, we get a lot of readers from Nigeria, the Philippines.

Arjun Basu: Do any of your writers have issues or problems navigating local concerns or authorities?

Anup Kaphle: I think it really depends on the subject matter of the story, right? And if you’re doing a more sort of like business-focused story and you are a reporter who’s well sourced and has the experience to figure out how to navigate that. It’s fine.

Sometimes we have issues because we’re a very new publication. So people may not want to speak to you, right? Or they don’t understand who you are. Sometimes it’s a very sensitive story and people don’t want to go on the record. But increasingly, I think this is a trend that’s happened over the last few years.

We realize a lot of readers, even like people in the street or like people who work inside companies, want to remain anonymous. And that is one challenge we face in terms of stories. A lot of our stories come with anonymous sources of people just wanting to give a pseudonym or a first name, even in very not-so-sensitive stories.

Arjun Basu: For the future, or because of something they’ve done in the past?

Anup Kaphle: I think they’re generally worried about the consequences. If you are a gig worker, and we’ve done a fair number of gig economy stories, people are worried about losing a job. I also think there is a sense that they will find out who it is, given the kind of company or the place.

It’s a small ecosystem, right? It’s not a vast, company ecosystem like in the West. And if you’re doing a story from Bangladesh and writing about one particular firm, it’s not going to have the same size of people working in that department or people who have access to that kind of information versus a huge company like Meta.

Arjun Basu: You guys won a National Magazine Award.

Anup Kaphle: Yes.

Arjun Basu: How did you feel after winning that? There is validation, but beyond that, just a recognition of your peers.

Anup Kaphle: It was incredibly exciting and that award came after we were a finalist the year before in the same category. And I think one of the best things about Rest of World is the kind of team members we have, not just in editorial, but in every department. And I think the award that we got was for design. And it’s a really collaborative team here at Rest of World.

The visual team works together with the designer. We have one designer in the whole publication. And the product team is incredibly talented in terms of how developers work to code the stories on a custom basis or for various different formats. So it felt like a triumph for the entire team because, yes, it was for design, but like the idea is that I think one of the stories we’d gotten nominated for was this thing called the Ambaniverse.

But it was really like showing just how connected the universe of Mukesh Ambani, this Indian billionaire is. And, like, how intertwined Indian lives are in the country in terms of politics—the systems that they own and the products that they own. And I thought we did a wonderful job, like visualizing that.

Awards are always validating. It’s always encouraging. It’s motivating too, especially for journalists who love recognition. And for us, especially as a small publication that launched in the middle of COVID, that had to work very hard for us to build a proof of concept and then slowly, you know, be out in the world competing with a lot of the heavyweights.

I think we were the first publication, first digital publication, to win in that category, if I’m not wrong. So yeah, it was incredibly exciting.

Arjun Basu: Of course most of the publications we do here are print, but what storytelling can you do as a digital-only publication that perhaps you couldn’t do if you were in print?

Anup Kaphle: In today’s world, I don’t think there's a huge difference because you look at the likes of New Yorker and New York Times Magazine, because this show is about magazines, they do some of the most innovative stuff online. It’s really about trying to reach new audiences when you’re a digital publication. Trying to figure out who you’re trying to reach, what formats you can experiment with.

Because if you’re a print magazine, you’re limited. There are still a lot of magazines, a number of them have come to this podcast that have a small niche audience, right? I think for something like tech, it’s huge. As I said, we have readers who come to us from India with readers who come to us from the Philippines, from Nigeria.

I don’t know if that would have happened if we were just a print publication. So that is more of what online does to a publication these days versus the limitation of print. But we experiment like a lot of other publications. Though I think our ability to do a lot of innovative stuff is limited given the size of the team, given our resources.

Arjun Basu: And you mentioned you’re a nonprofit. How does the funding work? You have subscriptions, but you also, I imagine, are supported by others.

Anup Kaphle: Yes. Sophie’s been our primary funder from the beginning. She actually committed a donation for 10 years when she founded the publication.

So we continue to get money from Sophie. And outside of that, starting last year, we’ve started fundraising and we’ve gotten support from Ford Foundation, from Luminate, from Henry Lewis Foundation. So like the usual philanthropic organizations that support the work of nonprofit media in the US.

Arjun Basu: And how involved is Sophie?

Anup Kaphle: So Sophie is the publisher of Rest of World. So as involved as any publisher would. She’s obviously not sitting there dictating stories or telling us what to write about, but she has great ideas. I report to Sophie. So we discuss, post-publication, what she liked, what she disliked.

She shares our stories on every platform. She’s a huge champion of our journalism. But her brain is also mostly focused on how Rest of World evolves as an organization. As a publication, where do we go? Like I said, the initial couple of years were really about building a foundation and solidifying that proof of concept.

And now a lot of surface thinking it’s about where do we go? How do we build an audience that keeps coming back to Rest of World? And, what does our revenue path look like outside of Sophie’s support in the long term?

Arjun Basu: That is exactly my next question. What’s the future look like? And I’m not talking about 10 years down the line. I think with the National Magazine Award, that was like, maybe one chapter. Like that was proof of concept, you got the recognition. What are the next steps? What’s the future?

Anup Kaphle: The future is trying to build a narrower audience that actually understands what we stand for, what kind of journalism it is that we do. And I think for the last couple of years, it’s been great to hear people say, “Oh, I love Rest of World. It does such interesting work.” And I think, as the editor in chief, I want to take Rest of World from that place of “you guys are interesting, you guys are doing these lovely stories” to “the Rest of World is essential,” right?

Like the kind of journalism that we do really matters, not just because of what we represent and how we do and what kind of stories we bring to the table, but really, so like it becomes a habit for people who are obsessed with technology and people who want to know where tech is headed, both in the West, but also mostly outside the West.

That is the big goal. And that probably means identifying and keeping a very narrow set of loyal readers, continuing to get recognition for the kind of journalism that we do, hiring great talent, and being in the space for years to come.

Arjun Basu: In your readership are there a lot of tech people, like the Silicon Valley types or anything? Do you hear from them, or no?

Anup Kaphle: We know there are, because of LinkedIn and occasional comments that we get. But have we done substantive surveys and stuff to understand who they are and where they are? At that level we haven’t. But we know decision makers both in Western tech space and the rest of world emerging market tech space, they’re very much part of our readership.

Arjun Basu: In your readership, are there a lot of tech people, like the Silicon Valley types or anything? Do you hear from them or no?

Anup Kaphle: We know there are, because of, LinkedIn and occasional like comments that we get but have we done substantive surveys and stuff to understand like who they are and where they are at that level we haven’t, but we know decision makers both in Western tech space and the rest of world emerging market tech space, they’re very much part of our readership.

Arjun Basu: And do they ever contact you or write you or…

Anup Kaphle: It's a great question. I can’t immediately recall a moment where someone has written. We get comments from a lot of startup entrepreneurs, for example, right? And it’s mostly “We like your mission. We’re glad it exists to bring stories from places like ours.”

Arjun Basu: I just wonder: one day someone’s gonna be reading your publication and see a use case for something they worked on that they never imagined and think, “Oh, why don’t we do that here?” Wherever ‘here’ is.

Anup Kaphle: Oh, that’s happened. I think this is a very narrow example, but when I was home a couple of months ago one of my friends, who is an investor, saw this story about a ride hailing startup. I believe it was in Togo or somewhere. And he shared this research deck that his team had prepared to figure out what that would look like in Nepal, in Kathmandu, particularly, it was a ride-hailing delivery model.

And it was really interesting to see the parallels between, “Here’s how this company works, this is how it’s operated, here’s what it’s found like success in. This is what sort of their population and income and stuff looks like, and here are the similarities with Nepal.”

I know that kind of stuff is happening in the background because people do write to us about that. But that was a recent example of someone actually saying, “I read this story and then got our team to do a deep dive and this is the report that they’d share.”

Arjun Basu: Because that in itself is an interesting story.

Anup Kaphle: Yes. And I think it’s an interesting story because we know tech is one of those things where people are being inspired from somebody else. And sometimes they don’t get what it is that they need in that particular platform or product. So they’re trying to redo that.

Arjun Basu: But so many things just happen in parallel. They may have an origin that is similar, but they happen in parallel because they adapt to whatever the local situation is. And then as they happen in parallel, they just start diverging in interesting ways. And that to me has always been very interesting, like just the way WhatsApp is used in different places of the world, when some places where it’s ubiquitous and in other places where it’s just, saying “Hi” to mom.

Anup Kaphle: Yes, we actually have a three-part series on WhatsApp coming out because we thought it was just like, it’s high time we write about the internet that WhatsApp has become. Even until five, six years ago people used to think Facebook is the internet. And obviously Facebook—Meta bought Whatsapp. But Whatsapp is the world in so many countries. It’s just the world that people live in, whether it’s making phone calls, doing videos, doing business, selling, buying.

Arjun Basu: And for bad things too, of course.

Anup Kaphle: Oh, absolutely. We joke a lot, at least I know in the South Asian diaspora, we joke a lot about the uncles and aunties sending all this fake news and misinformation stuff, but it is very real. And we’ve done a lot of reporting about that apparatus, right? Like how misinformation and disinformation kind of proliferates within WhatsApp.

Arjun Basu: I ask this of everyone, what are three magazines you recommend right now?

Anup Kaphle: Magazines. Can I broaden it out? So the first one is actually a podcast, which I’ve been obsessed with lately. It’s called Empire. It’s this fascinating podcast with—

Arjun Basu: —I’m listening to it right now.

Anup Kaphle: Yeah. It’s this incredible conversation between William Dalrymple.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. And Anita Anand.

Anup Kaphle: Yeah, and they’re looking at this rise and fall of empires in history and how they shape the world. So I’m really enjoying that. I recommend that to everybody.

The other one is, I don’t know how many international magazines you cover, but I am a huge fan of The Caravan in India. I think if you want to understand India, you have to read The Caravan. Whenever we think of magazines, we often think of Western publications. And Caravan, which sometimes people call it The New Yorker of India, they publish these deeply-reported definitive stories about the most consequential stuff in things like politics and business and culture.

And then, the third one is The Examination. It’s one of my favorite non-profit publications right now. They cover health from three core coverage areas: tobacco, pollution, and big food. And their stories often have an investigative element to it. They’re consistently finding stories that you wouldn’t really get to read in any other publication.