Billionaire Eric Schmidt’s daughter to close $60m news site

Rest of World, the nonprofit technology news site founded by Sophie Schmidt, daughter of American billionaire and former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt, will stop publishing as an independent outlet at the end of January after a steep fall in readership.

Sophie Schmidt, the publication’s founder and main funder, told donors that Rest of World will “cease publishing as a standalone entity” at the end of January 2027. She has held talks with several large institutions about taking over the newsroom, but no partner has been named and no deal has been announced. A late-January wind-down date has been set so that staff receive exit packages and time to find new jobs if those talks fail. Schmidt declined to comment.

Rina Chandran, the site’s deputy editor, confirmed the plan in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “Yes, it’s true: Rest of World is shutting down,” she wrote. She said the newsroom will keep publishing through January while its leaders look for a new home, and that work already commissioned will go ahead. “If you are a freelancer or columnist who has already been commissioned, you’re good!” she wrote. Its published journalism will remain online.

A $60 million pledge

Schmidt announced Rest of World in May 2019 with her mother, Wendy Schmidt, and launched it in May 2020 to cover how technology shapes life outside the U.S. and Western Europe. She called it her “life’s project.” In September 2020 she said she had put in $6 million from a family trust and planned to spend up to $60 million over the following decade.

The site never sold ads or subscriptions. It relied on Schmidt’s money, the Schmidt Family Foundation, grants from the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation and Luminate, and donations and sponsorships. It built a newsroom with an office in New York and reporters in cities including Berlin, Hong Kong and Bangalore, and worked with more than 400 freelancers in over 100 countries.

Its reporting on Uber Eats couriers in South Africa and on digital mapping in rural Borneo led to policy changes. The site also hired Maryam Saleh as its first investigations editor in January 2025.

Traffic collapse

Readership began to fall sharply about 18 months ago, around the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. People inside the publication blame the same forces hitting news sites across the industry: Meta Platforms Inc. has cut back on showing news links on Facebook and Instagram, and AI tools such as Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT now answer readers’ questions without sending them to the original story. Its leaders have also pointed to a rightward shift in the tech industry and a move by readers toward podcasts, YouTube and chatbots.

The newsroom tried several fixes. It aimed more of its coverage at Western readers, put more weight on regions such as China and asked readers to register before reading articles. None of it stopped the decline. Schmidt has privately acknowledged that the smaller audience has reduced the outlet’s impact.

The closure plan follows a change at the top. Anup Kaphle, the founding editor-in-chief who joined in 2020, stepped down in the spring and moved into an advisory role as he returned to his native Nepal. Executive editors Christine Glancey and Michael Zelenko now run daily publishing, and Gordon Saft is the publisher.

Sophie Schmidt studied at Princeton University and later earned degrees from Stanford and Harvard. Before starting Rest of World, she worked in public policy and communications at Uber Technologies Inc. and held jobs at Chinese phone maker Xiaomi Corp. in Beijing and at Moby Group, an Afghan media company, in Dubai.

Her father ran Google from 2001 to 2011 and stayed on as executive chairman of the company and later its parent, Alphabet Inc., until 2017. Most of his fortune comes from his Alphabet shares. He has since become an active investor in artificial intelligence and defense technology, and chaired the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.