Rest of World Faces Prospect of Shutting Down

Maxwell Tani, Semafor: The globally-minded tech news startup Rest of World is scrambling to find a new home — or faces the prospect of shutting down. The six-year-old digital publication has seen the social and web search traffic on which it depends evaporate. This sharp decline has prompted the organization’s founder and primary financial backer, Sophie Schmidt, to explore other options for its future. This is disappointing. Rest of World is one of my favourite publications with a scope unlike anything else. It is essential reading. Schmidt is the daughter of former Google executive Eric Schmidt who I just happened to read, owns one percent of Anthropic which will surely grow his already ungodly fortune when the company begins trading publicly in the coming weeks. While Rest of World is not a family affair, that windfall alone could probably run the publication — already largely funded by the Schmidt Family Foundation — for years, enough to buy it some time to figure out how to…