Our Best Year Yet
Expect More in 2025
By Joel Schalit and Natalie Sarkic-Todd
Letter From the Editor
Five years is a century these days. Particularly online, where it’s getting harder by the day to remember what I published last week, let alone in 2019.
Nothing moves faster than the news cycle, and memory is a luxury.
This is one of the reasons I co-founded The Battleground. I’d spent a decade working for big news media and knew there was a need to slow down to do better journalism.
Not just any kind of journalism, but long-form analysis, street photography, eBooks and field recordings. In other words, equally hard work but light years from agency reporting.
The problem was how to present it. The last thing we wanted was to create a magazine modelled after Apple’s App Store, offering a little bit of everything.
Instead, we evolved something closer to Anglo-American belle lettres publications. The approach still worked; it just needed to be more relatable.
Fast-forward to today, and The Battleground has published several thousand articles and original photographs, five eBooks, and five full-length records.
Our core team is split between Brussels, Torino, and Valencia, with regular writers from Germany, the UK, and the US and a network of contributors that spans Europe and the Middle East.
Even though we’re patronised by lay audiences— our readership doubled this year to 400,000 in 60 countries, and our biggest demographic is people aged 18 to 44—this isn’t a standard profile for our market.
Our goal was to reach a larger, less specialised audience than other Brussels media, and we’ve done that, though we maintain a strong readership at home, with policymakers and legislators in the EU institutions and local press.
From 2025 through 2026, we plan to launch (at least) two new editorial projects on refugees and the far-right, a new podcast platform for independent journalists, and publish six new eBooks and albums.
So, on our fifth anniversary, we’re making a case for supporting media like ours.
While as topical as traditional news platforms, ours is focused more on narratives than breaking stories.
What we publish may be more complex than a 400-word piece of policy reporting. But our growing audience confirms a public need for work like ours.
Not just any public, but a European, North American and increasingly international one that wants more depth and creativity from political media and values disciplines like photojournalism as much as news writing.
That’s a tall remit, to be sure. The answer is to think outside the box and publish differently while maintaining our interest in politics, including through culture.
This is what distinguishes us.
Part of The Battleground’s mission is to broaden the envelope, experiment and routinise new working methods while recovering older forms of journalism lost in the digital transition, like documentary audio recordings.
It’s all part of our dedication to democracy and the fightback against nationalism, which demands we rethink everything we do as journalists to preserve and improve upon our collective freedoms.
If you can’t reimagine how you work and what you communicate, you might as well retire. That worldview sets The Battleground apart and is why we’ve persevered.
Here’s to the next five years of doing this even better.
-Joel Schalit
Message From the Publisher
Why support The Battleground?
In addition to the obvious need for independent media, our audiences increasingly rely on platforms like The Battleground to resist attacks on our fundamental freedoms and shared values: democracy, diversity, equality, human rights, and the rule of law.
When we launched five years ago, I warned of the dangers of populism, even fascism, creeping into politics. Our editor-in-chief also expressed concern about the increasing intolerance of minorities and refugees.
Coming from different countries, continents, and cultures, we could see the common threads of a world in crisis: financial, political, social, and environmental.
We also saw how power-hungry politicians and captured media were using these threads to subvert truth, social justice, and democracy.
We had to act. To take a stand for independent journalism, which challenges false narratives and holds politicians (and media) accountable for their words and deeds.
In all our work, we have striven to build a nonprofit that upholds truth and integrity. To create a shared understanding of our increasingly complex world.
We pioneered a more ethical approach to journalism in Brussels media and set the course for others to follow.
And it has worked.
Now, it’s time to look to the next five years.
We see that more than ever, The Battleground is needed: To challenge false narratives, counter vested interests and defuse culture wars intended to distract and divide.
From the outset, we proudly self-funded our development. But to step up our fight in the continuing battle against disinformation and xenophobia, we need your support.
Donate to The Battleground.
Join the fightback.
Thank you.
-Natalie Sarkic-Todd
Please support The Battleground. Subscribe to our free newsletter and make a donation to ensure our continued growth and independence.
Note for US Supporters:
US-based donors can now make tax-deductible contributions to The Battleground US Fund at Myriad USA. Because Myriad USA is a public charity, within the meaning of Sections 501(c)(3) and 509(a)(1) of the IRC, donors may claim the maximum tax benefits allowed by U.S. tax law for their contributions. If you wish to support us, here is how to proceed:
Gifts by check: Address your check to Myriad USA, write The Battleground US Fund in the memo section of the check, and send it to Myriad USA at 551 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2400, New York, NY 10176
Gifts by credit card: https://www.every.org/the-battleground/
Gifts by wire transfer or to contribute other types of property: Contact Myriad USA via email at donations@myriadusa.org or phone (212) 713-7660.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.