Yi-Ling Liu
Beijing, China
Yi-Ling Liu is a writer based in China. She writes a regular column for Rest of World on the Chinese internet, examining how its apps, digital phenomena, and subcultures are radically reshaping the everyday lives of people in China and beyond.
Why did you become a journalist?
I love stories, words, and other people. Writing fiction seemed pretty lonely; writing nonfiction involved deeply immersing oneself in the outside world. So, I started writing nonfiction in high school and have tried to keep it going ever since.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
China is a society of jarring contradictions. Rich with dynamic change and yet constrained by the ever-shifting and unpredictable hand of the censor. Living and writing here is like existing in a freewheeling carnival, a gilded cage, and a barren landscape all at once.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
I wrote a story about Hong Kong for Harper’s. It was the most challenging piece — on the level of narrative craft, strategic sourcing, political implications, emotional investment, and personal self-discovery — that I’ve written.
Snigda Poonam
Dehradun, India
Snigdha Poonam is an independent journalist and author based in India. She wrote a story for Rest of World about India’s dark data economy.
Why did you become a journalist?
I wanted to write stories of real people caught in incredible circumstances.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
In India, I face the constant dilemma of choosing one story to report among hundreds of unprecedented developments taking place every day.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
No one story, but I am proud of capturing some of the biggest forces shaping contemporary India, through the stories of ordinary people.
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
Based on an exposé a colleague and I wrote about a multimillion-rupee insurance scam implicating state officials, the government-in-charge opened official investigations.
Can you tell us how you stumbled onto the story about India’s dark data economy? And what convinced you that Rest of World would be the right home for it?
While reporting on internet-based scams, my co-reporter and I kept running into the existence of databases that enabled those scams, be it credit card or lottery, and estimated that there must be data brokers who buy and sell online Indians’ personal information, such as where they live, what they eat, and what they buy. We had been following Rest of World’s coverage of similar phenomena at the intersection of tech and society from other countries.
What does Western/English-language media usually get wrong about coverage in your region?
Their obsession with judging the state of everything, from dating to democracy, by vague Western ideals often makes them miss the big stories unfolding in India.
What’s your favorite Rest of World story that isn’t yours?
The dispatch from Tuvalu on how its future may lie in its two-letter domain name.
Leonid Ragozin
Riga, Latvia
Leonid Ragozin spent most of his 20-year career in journalism working for the BBC in Moscow. He’s written about techno-utopian villages in Russia and Telegram’s Nazi problem for Rest of World.
Why did you become a journalist?
I was afraid of approaching people I didn’t know, so I needed an excuse. I also wanted my travels to pay for themselves.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
I honestly wish that the country I come from were less challenging, if not utterly boring. Because it happens to be Russia.
Seriously speaking, one of two greatest challenges working in Eastern Europe is having to deal with people who can only see you through the lens of your ethnicity or nationality, especially when you are Russian.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
I feel most proud about participating in the ongoing investigation into the assassination of my colleague Pavel Sheremet, together with the Ukrainian publication Zaborona.
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
A senior Russian migration service official was fired after my question prompted him into a racist tirade about Western Europe losing its white identity. That happened within an hour of the article going up on the BBC website.
Danielle Mackey
New York City, United States
Danielle Mackey is an independent investigative journalist based in El Salvador for the past decade. She wrote a story about online political harassment in Ecuador for Rest of World.
Why did you become a journalist?
I like Didion’s adage about writing in order to think, but I also appreciate the motivation journalism provides to listen to people and to question power. Journalism is a concrete way of engaging with the world, and for that I am grateful.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your region?
I’ve mostly practiced journalism in El Salvador and Honduras, where security and legal risks are high and worsening for the independent press. Both places struggle with widespread violence that is the result of multiple deep-rooted factors; it is an ongoing challenge for the media to avoid recurring simplistic narratives that flatten the region into a stereotype.
Samanth Subramanian
London, United Kingdom
Samanth Subramanian is an author and a contributing writer to the Guardian Long Read. He took part in our Future Thinking series with a story about the challenges reporters face in India.
Why did you become a journalist?
I wanted to tell stories. I found the real world strange and wonderful and sometimes (often?) disturbing but always unfailingly fascinating. I wanted to be able to get others to share this sense of fascination.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
I wanted to tell stories. I found the real world strange and wonderful and sometimes (often?) disturbing but always unfailingly fascinating. I wanted to be able to get others to share this sense of fascination.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
A piece on Breach Candy Club, published in Granta, about a small, fierce dispute between the members of an old colonial club in Mumbai. The story of the dispute somehow offered me a host of intriguing characters, a depth of historical narrative, and encapsulations of bigger ideas and themes about modern India. It isn’t often that you find all these in one tale.
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
Would I be a bad journalist if I said that I can’t recall any such moments? I don’t do investigative stories that change laws or bring governments down. I’m sure my stories, like all stories, have an impact — I’d be having an existential crisis if I thought that wasn’t the case! — but I think that, like the work of other journalists, mine too acts in a supplementary manner. I trust that it changes minds or informs or provokes, but these impacts are invisible, happening out there among readers.
Kirsten Han
Singapore
Kirsten Han is a freelance journalist based in Singapore. She’s written several pieces for Rest of World, including a story about the long-term consequences of Covid-19 surveillance in Singapore.
Why did you become a journalist?
It was something that developed very organically out of my love for writing as well as a desire to tell stories that matter.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
Singapore is a small but complex place to write about. The government is authoritarian, and many civil and political rights are suppressed, but it doesn’t feel like that to a lot of people going about their day-to-day lives. Looking at the layers and layers of different experiences and perspectives of Singapore, then trying to communicate all this to readers who might not be that familiar with this country, is something that is very challenging but also endlessly fascinating, for me.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
I don’t have a particular story that I’m most proud of; I tend to see all the stories that I do over the years — on a range of seemingly different subject matter, and for different publications — as one ongoing story that I’m trying to the best of my ability to tell about my country and what goes on here.
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
Last year, I self-published a story that I had worked out for years — I think it’s the longest amount of time I have spent on a single piece before publication. It was about a mother whose son, serving a life sentence in prison in Singapore, had alleged that he was being mistreated and even assaulted by prison officers. Her experience highlighted the lack of independent oversight mechanisms to investigate such allegations in Singapore. It was a difficult story to write, but for this mother, it was so important that she was listened to and her son’s story told.
Danai Nesta Kupemba
Harare, Zimbabwe
Danai Nesta Kupemba is a journalist who wrote about Clubhouse’s impact on the Zimbabwean diaspora for Rest of World. Born in Germany to Zimbabwean parents, she spent most of her childhood in London and Harare, Zimbabwe.
Why did you become a journalist?
I wanted to become a journalist because I love the media, but it is incredibly flawed. From the people who tell the stories to how they are told and who gets the media’s attention, it is a ghastly unfair industry. I hope, as a journalist, to highlight underrepresented stories, dispel stereotypes (especially when it comes to Africa), and to champion justice, peace, and love. I want my work to bring people to the intersection of compassion and understanding. I have so much faith in what the world can be, and if the words I write push this hope forward, even slightly, it makes being a journalist worth it.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
What’s interesting about being a Zimbabwean journalist is you need to tread carefully. I’m very cautious of the stories I decide to pursue. It forces me to be as objective as possible, to look at all sides and understand that there isn’t one side, or even two sides. There are multiple perspectives that need to be taken into consideration. Being a Zimbabwean journalist, I need to understand that you can’t take everything at face value; there’s a web spinning behind every single story.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
I’m probably most proud of the first-ever story of mine that was published in Al Jazeera, as that started everything for me, and it’s about my incredible parents, my family, and the path that led me to where I am now. Without that story, I don’t think I would have found the confidence to pitch and write the stories that followed.
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
When I went through multiple rounds of edits for a story I did last year. I was constantly interviewing sources and going back and forth with the editor. It was the first time I felt like a journalist, and it was a pretty big story, and I was juggling it along with my honors year. It was the first time I felt I was no longer an aspiring journalist, I actually was a journalist.
Alizeh Kohari
Karachi, Pakistan
Alizeh Kohari is a Pakistani journalist who divides her time between Karachi and Mexico City. She’s written for Rest of World about efforts to bring Urdu to smartphones and the fight for better internet access in a region nestled among the highest peaks on Earth.
Why did you become a journalist?
I remember “reporting” on a jinn sighting at my aunt’s house when I was 8 years old, so in a way, it feels like I’ve always been a journalist. I never wanted to be anything other than a writer. I love going down rabbit holes, the more winding the better, and I love the feeling of putting all the pieces of a story together, like a really satisfying jigsaw puzzle.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
For a long time now, there’s a single story that’s been told about Pakistan — terrorism, religion — to the rest of the world; as a local journalist, it’s pretty exhausting having to continually dodge that framework while reporting for an audience that you’re told only has that one frame of reference. Telling stories about Pakistan, as I see it, often requires a great deal of “un-telling.”
What story are you proudest of in your career?
I once spent three months traveling the length of the Indus — by bus, boat, train, tractor, and, on one occasion, by horse in the dead of the night! — to produce a 10,000-word people’s history of the river for the now-defunct Herald magazine (RIP).
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
A few years ago, I reported on how the internet is exacerbating the misuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan; the story centered on a teenage boy and his father, the latter in jail for alleged blasphemy. When the story published, the teenager called to say how seen he felt. I wish I could say the story changed some aspect of the law or even the specific case; it did not, and the father remains in jail. But if I can help document and amplify a few voices on the margins, that’s impact enough for me.
Atul Bhattarai
Kathmandu, Nepal
Atul Bhattarai is a journalist and editor based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He wrote a story for Rest of World about the rise (and fall) of a massive industry in India based on missed calls.
Why did you become a journalist?
I wanted to find and write the kind of stories I most enjoy reading — making readers invested in dedicated communities that they wouldn’t have even thought they were curious about.
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
It’s easy to get discouraged by parallel-seeming stories in our two giant neighbors, China and India — you really have to ferret out what’s unique about Nepal.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
I wrote a story about the post-earthquake reconstruction of a 1,000-year-old building in Kathmandu. Trying to frame the wealth of history that suddenly bubbles up to the surface in a story like that, while making it relevant, was challenging but very gratifying, and it set the stage for the kind of stories I’ve done since.
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
My favorite moment of being a journalist is when people tell me a story I wrote about was happening right under their noses, and they didn’t have a clue, or they couldn’t imagine how deep the rabbit hole went. It just underlines how secure our individual bubbles are, and how exhilarating it is when we’re able to see past them, even fleetingly
Mariya Karimjee
Karachi, Pakistan
Mariya Karimjee is a freelance journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. She’s written for Rest of World about an online attack on organizers of Pakistan’s Women’s March and why Tinder is more than a just dating app in the country.
Why did you become a journalist?
I became a journalist because I wanted to tell stories that mattered. (I know! It’s such a dumb answer, but there really wasn’t a whole lot more to my choice than this!)
What is uniquely challenging or interesting about being a journalist in your country?
I think probably the most challenging thing about being a reporter in Pakistan is worrying about state censorship and backlash and choosing to pursue a story despite all of that.
What story are you proudest of in your career?
The story I’m proudest of in my career is a personal essay I wrote for The Big Roundtable about my family, religious sect, and female genital mutilation (FGM).
Can you tell us about any memorable moments of impact that your journalism led to?
My FGM essay spurred my religious community into talking about what was essentially an open secret. Various UN agencies use it to teach sensitivity training, and I think the essay has been instrumental in destigmatizing how we speak about parents and FGM as well as reshaping approaches to end the practice.
