The Battleground

Blame it on the journalism. The Battleground's audience will reach 800,000 by December 2025. While we are grateful for the growth, what surprises us most is that it has happened mainly through word of mouth. It's been a massive shot in the arm for a small team like ours. As any publisher will tell you, investing in the audience you already have is the only way to sustain growth. With readers and listeners in over 60 countries, our work is cut out for us. Our solution is to scale up our operations by adding editorial and marketing capacity and to cover key geographies where media independence and news coverage are threatened. For example, we wish to expand our analysis and contextualisation of events in Israel/Palestine, Syria and Turkey, drawing on existing and new regional contributors. Given developments in the region since October 2023, such as the Gaza war, the collapse of Syria's Assad regime, and the demilitarisation of Turkey's PKK, there is an urgent need for big-picture takes that rise above the headlines and localise their significance in Europe. We are fortunate to have a progressive Israeli editor at the helm, educated in the Middle East, North America, and the United Kingdom, who has worked for Israeli, American, and European news media and book publishers for over 30 years. Based in Brussels, we also have a core management team comprising experienced media and communications professionals from Belgium, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as a journalistic network hailing from Europe, the Middle East and North America. Please see our team bios and contributors on The Battleground website. Building on six years of documenting the rise of nationalism and the far right in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, we plan to broaden our understanding of threats to media independence and democracy by sharing strategies and tactics deployed to destabilise social cohesion globally. Efforts to restrict women's rights are especially significant. The patriarchal backlash is core to the European nationalist project and the delegitimisation of liberal democracy, and an opportunity to heighten The Battleground's coverage of women in politics and culture and increase the gender diversity of our editorial staff. Far-right movements are not assimilable and are often hostile to one another. However, they increasingly communicate with each other and share best practices designed to stigmatise immigrants and minorities and promote ethno-religious and gender homogeneity. Consider it a global playbook. The Battleground will publish the proceeds of our research online and in book format and market the content to the European press and human rights campaigners. EU media do not do this kind of research and publishing in Brussels, as their focus is on policy reporting. Our taking it on is a significant departure from local journalistic convention. We also need funding to create a Western Balkans editorial offer that deconstructs nationalist narratives, counters Russia's malign influence, and provides an informed, critical, and independent alternative to the region’s highly politicised media landscape. The political situation has changed dramatically since the Dayton Accords in 1995. The weaponisation of nationalism is one such example. Serbs employ it against Muslim communities in Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro, accusing them of chauvinism when they push back against efforts to create a Greater Serbia. Their playbook is instantly recognisable for its echoes of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin. This would involve funding journalism to catalogue local nationalist movements, explore how they fit into East-West political rivalries, examine how they discriminate against local minority groups, and produce podcasts to share this work with Western European and North American audiences. Last but not least, we plan on deepening our culture coverage in 2026. Featuring longform essays on music, film, and books, The Battleground is the only media platform in the EU press community to take the arts seriously — and, even better, tie them to European politics. It's not a bold move in other capital city markets. But, in Brussels, it's revolutionary. With strong regional media connections and a deep understanding of local politics, The Battleground is perfectly positioned to achieve its journalistic objectives. We break the rules to make better journalism. The following is where funding will be directed: Staff salaries: Editorial, marketing, fundraising, and design; Upgrade to the Ghost newsletter platform and CMS; Sustainable growth to 1 million readers.

Refugees may be treated like dirt. But to the far right, they’re a political goldmine. No minority group is as thoroughly stigmatised. Not just in politically conservative, Eastern European countries but, increasingly, in liberal, Western, social democratic ones too. Distrusted for their statelessness and incited against for their ethnicity and faith, no one in today’s Europe is as thoroughly dehumanised. They’re the perfect excuse to close borders, deny social benefits, scapegoat for crime, and restrict human rights. Once confined to nationalist and fascist politics, spurred on by social media agitators and populist political parties, such caricatures have become increasingly common sense. Even Germany, once the EU’s most prominent champion of asylum rights, has closed its open borders and normalised deporting asylum seekers to unsafe countries like Syria. That's why we've chosen to make field recordings of the refugee crisis for this project. From the sounds of refugees being rescued at sea to the music played in refugee camps, everything that asylum seekers sound like signifies foreign to those who fear them. Using field recordings to document their plight highlights their humanity in ways written journalism cannot. We propose to do this by recording refugees and migrants in the following contexts: In refugee camps; In migrant-heavy city neighbourhoods; At sites of mass refugee drownings, such as off the coast of Cutro, Italy, in 2023, using hydrophones (underwater microphones); During NGO rescues at sea; In places of worship, such as mosques and churches. This work would be done in Greece, Italy, Spain and Turkey, in close coordination with local authorities and NGOs, and on the street. Using this source material, we would produce the following media: Two full-length albums of field recordings, arranged by geographic and physical context; A photo book consisting of street and documentary photography of what and who we recorded and their locations; A collection of essays about field recording, its relationship to traditional audio and radio journalism, and its place in podcast and streaming culture.  The Battleground will edit and publish this work as regular editorial content on its website and newsletter platforms throughout the project. The albums will be published by The Battleground’s audio arm, Battleground Sounds , and made available through longtime retail partner Bandcamp , as well as streaming services. Battleground Books will distribute the eBook editions internationally through our new UK-based digital book distributor, Faber Factory . Battleground Editor-in-Chief Joel Schalit and audio engineer Vance Galloway will undertake the project. Schalit and Galloway have played together in post-punk and experimental political bands since 1994 and helped run the late, great Asphodel label in the early 2000s. Vance Galloway built audio visual systems and floating recording studios to produce records by the likes of U2 and the Rolling Stones, for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.