State of the Battleground
Making News in 2024
By Joel Schalit
2023 was a hard year for news media. With Twitter's decline under Elon Musk and Facebook continuing to bury political posts, we all had to find audiences elsewhere.
Compounded by the pressures of publishing on fraught topics, such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, progressive platforms like The Battleground had to be especially careful with their stories.
Particularly working in a brutal news environment, in which disinformation is everywhere, and social media are dominated by a very aggressive far-right. Toxic doesn't begin to describe it.
Despite this situation, we're flourishing. As we enter our fifth year of existence, The Battleground has a core audience of 200,000, and running on a shoestring, we built it through word of mouth.
Even though I wish social media were still viable - Twitter used to be very helpful to us - seventy per cent of our audience comes from Google Search. The rest reaches us through Reddit. That's very healthy.
Our focus is on reaching people through the work we commission, not apps. There is no English-language progressive media in the EU besides The Battleground, and we're filling a huge gap.
If you look at our neighbours in the Brussels news media, you can see why. Most are centre-right and focused on EU policy reporting, not political analysis, culture or the Middle East.
When was the last time you read a review of a book about Italian labour politics in the city’s press or an essay about trans women divas making electronic music in Berlin? That's where we come in.
Let's not get started on Israel/Palestine and how one can read entire features on the war in Gaza and never find an Arab or Palestinian quoted. Not even from local diplomatic missions.
I don't mean to focus too much on what makes The Battleground special. My point is that we're doing groundbreaking work, and it's a big part of why we survived the past five years.
That said, we will be doing a lot more of it. In 2024, we hope to release three books and three records and return to regular podcasting, particularly on UK politics. Found sound DJ mixes from our field recording work are planned, too.
As usual, these projects will be tightly wrapped with our feature articles. The trick we'll be sorting out this year is integrating everything visually.
While many online media also publish books and sometimes music, such efforts are considered bonus works outside their daily publishing regimes.
There's no reason that books, records, and photojournalism shouldn't be regarded as regular feature content in a news media's workflow. We want to change that.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.