An urgent appeal to support progressive media in Bulgaria!

We call for solidarity with the Baricada news agency

Baricada is a professional Bulgarian progressive news portal offering news and analyses on politics, economics and social justice. Its editorial team consists of five committed journalists, with long experience in reputable media outlets. Baricada was born in 2016 during a particularly difficult period for Bulgarian journalism that witnessed the shutdown of many printed publications and increased media concentration and monopolization by economic forces close to the ruling party. Unlike many other media outlets, Baricada operates in strict compliance with Bulgarian labour laws and is one of the few law-abiding employers in the Bulgarian media market, riddled with exploitative and precarious employment practices that force many journalists into the grey economy.

Baricada is the only Bulgarian-language media that operates from a working-class standpoint, offering uncompromising left-wing perspectives on politics, economics and culture daily. It cannot be overstressed that such perspectives are jarringly absent from Bulgaria’s mediascape, completely beholden to the interests of Big business.

Baricada is more than a magazine. Since its inception in 2016, it has joined and popularized several progressive causes and civic initiatives, such as the struggle against the flat tax of 2017 and Vanya Grigorova’s ground-breaking 2019 electoral campaign that represented workers and people with disabilities for the first time in Bulgarian politics. Baricada has also helped the budding anti-TTIP/CETA movement.

Now Baricada needs your help!

Baricada’s promising development and upward trajectory since its inception (i.e. consistent growth of readers throughout the years, reaching over 1 million people since 2016) was unfortunately offset by a sudden financial blow sustained by our benefactor (a progressive Polish publisher). At the beginning of June 2019, he broke the news to our team that he was unable to support us at this stage, despite his deeply held desire to continue doing so. Thus, Baricada’s funding was slashed at the beginning of the year, and in the past two months has been non-existent.

It is highly likely that in the coming weeks the portal will downsize and will cease its daily operations altogether.

Due to Baricada’s uncompromising politics, finding a strategic investor in Bulgaria is virtually impossible. As most Bulgarians have little disposable income and are unaccustomed to making donations, crowdfunding in Bulgaria has minimal potential. In short, we are running out of options in a context of a small and heavily concentrated advertising market centred around 2-3 major sources of ad revenue (answerable to the powers that be), while the kind of mass grassroots mobilization needed to overcome their financial gravity is wholly absent.

To put things in perspective, for the first five months of 2019, Baricada’s advertising revenue and income from media partnerships totalled a meagre 4,033 euro.

Because of this, Baricada is sending out an urgent appeal for assistance to foreign partners and sponsors of progressive initiatives. The portal’s monthly operating budget is about 5,000 euro, but Baricada could survive as a professional publication with a sustained inflow of at least 3,500 euro/month while we continue to explore additional funding possibilities.

If you are interested, we are willing to produce detailed reports on our finances as well as publishing work, as well as discuss proposals concerning the improvement of the prospects for the progressive initiatives in Bulgaria.

Please help us continue our work! We are the only independent voice Bulgarian workers and left-wing forces have!

IBAN: BG98STSA93000023933464, SWIFT/BIC: STSABGSF

Any help is much appreciated!

Contact: contact@baricada.org