The strategy behind tech coverage at Rest of World

Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology podcast interviewed Rest of World founder Sophie Schmidt and senior editor Louise Matsakis about its strategy for covering technology news outside of the United States and Europe.

Here is an excerpt:

I like how your publication just digs a little deeper

Sophie Schmidt: The knowledge gap is enormous. I still have people pitching these things like, “Hey, I was driving around Africa, and oh, my God, they’re using mobile money.” M-Pesa launched more than 10 years ago. And that gap in reporting, the gap in infrastructure of reporting, is what we’re trying to build.

Why Louise is spending time training and developing writers in their own countries, is because most of the countries that we cover have no tech journalism tradition at all. Maybe they’ll come up in one story once. But that’s a big problem because these countries are changing incredibly quickly. And I think of how much attention we put on our tech experiences. And we’re only scratching the surface of what it’s doing.

The thing that makes me really, really excited about our commitment to working and training local writers is that if we’re successful, 10 years from now, we will have trained a generation of tech journalists in their own countries. Maybe they write for us a couple times. And then, they go off, and they go work at DAWN or they go work in the nation. The more capacity we can build in different regions beyond just the TechCrunch trade journal version of this, the better off we’ll all be.

Read more here.