Popular Front: a guide to independent war reporting

“I had to start my own thing or I just wanted to quit. So I started my own thing. And, thank God it took off,” Hanrahan recalls in a conversation with The Fix. He started Popular Front on his own and with no money. He was only supported by his childhood friend Sam Black who produces the music for Popular Front. In the first four months, the podcast gained 50,000 unique downloads, largely from Apple Podcasts. As of February 2023, Popular Front’s unique monthly downloads were at 100,000, crossing 1 million annually, Hanrahan says. 

About half a year after the podcast, Popular Front started its YouTube channel. As of April 2023, the channel had 154,000 subscribers and largely focuses on short documentaries. The most popular video on the channel is “Plastic Defence: Secret 3D Printed Guns in Europe”, a 26-minute documentary about illegal 3D-printed firearms in Europe and the decentralised network behind them. It has been viewed 2.9 million times. 

Popular Front aims to make war coverage accessible for everyone through going deeper than mainstream media. This includes covering underreported conflicts or focusing on the niche details of modern warfare. Among the documentaries Popular Front published on YouTube, we can find those about clashes in Athens, Paris, and Seattle, see how Raqqa was guarded from ISIS sleeping cells, or how people protested against regimes in Hong Kong, Belarus, and Corsica. In 2021 Popular Front went to the frontlines in Nagorno-Karabakh, showing how the war affected people there and whether the ceasefire was really holding between Azerbaijan and Armenia. In 2022-2023 they have published documentaries about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

More documentaries are available exclusively for Popular Front’s patrons, but podcasts are available for everyone. They are published up to four times a month, usually an hour-long dive deep in topics like the “military e-girl industrial complex” or “Russia’s anarchist partisans fighting Putin from within”. Some podcasts are also available exclusively to patrons.

Popular Front has strict rules for coverage: don’t post pictures of children unless the team decides it’s important enough for everyone to see it, don’t use state sources, blur the faces of dead people in photos, and never completely record or take pictures of the bodies.

In all these years, Popular Front has remained a small operation. The team is just about five or six people, Hanrahan says, but the overall initiative is associated with thousands across the world. A wide network of contacts around the world ensures the team a quick exchange of information and reaching places where it can be a problem.  

At Popular Front, the work is organised by projects and everyone works on a freelance basis. A sound producer, social media manager, operator, and researchers are among the regular collaborators. The number of people responsible for research depends on the subject. For instance, just about four people including Hanrahan recently worked on a documentary about Russian anti-Putin partisans. Hanrahan continues to be an active contributor to all the documentaries and podcasts. Hanrahan says that he is extremely cautious in terms of the team’s security, which is why he accompanies them almost always for different projects and makes sure everyone has the right kit.

This small team seems to be the key to Popular Front’s success as a journalistic venture for more than one reason.

The playbook

A big feature of the content produced by the Popular Front is that its contributors are all from different backgrounds and much like Hanrahan, are self-taught, without any strict qualifications. Hanrahan, before working for media organisations like BBC News and Esquire, did a few odd jobs at building sites, a call centre and a clothing store. He didn’t have a high school diploma and wrote his first few articles for free. While hiring people for projects today, he values similar unconventional backgrounds the most now. He believes that authenticity and experience are key to the Popular Front stories. “We always wanted to cater to the misfits, people who feel like “Oh, I don’t have a role in this journalism industry”. “I really think that has made a big difference,” he says in the conversation with The Fix.

The small size of the Popular Front operation, though, is largely on account of financial constraints, something that has also kept the organisation independent. Hanrahan says that Popular Front earns enough for a small media organisation and does a lot with that little money. “War reporting is nowhere near as expensive as mainstream publications have made it. They have oversized budgets, spend too much on things, and pay people ridiculous money for nothing.  So we have found a way to make it work, but it is still expensive,” he says. 

Hanrahan reinvests all the money he makes from the side projects in Popular Front. He says that the platform needs £200,000 a year for stable development. Besides producing podcasts and videos, Popular Front sells printed zines and merchandise on its own website. 

The project’s main source of income though are Patreon subscriptions. There are 5 levels of monthly subscription: $1, $5, $10, $30, and $100. The $5 cheque is the most popular subscription plan. As of April 2023, Popular Front had 2,521 patrons. Hanrahan says that political projects are usually able to attract larger support on Patreon. As an example, he mentions the far-left American podcast Chapo Trap House, which has over 43,000 subscribers on Patreon and earns over $183,000 every month. Popular Front doesn’t have a political affiliation, Hanrahan says. “ Yeah, we’re affiliated with anti-fascist because that’s the right thing to do.  We don’t like people that are racist and fascist. But I think that’s a normal opinion,” he says.  

Outside of these income streams, Popular Front also makes money from YouTube. At the end of January this year, Popular Front also invested time in live-streaming on YouTube, where it can make around £400 in less than 2 hours with donations. Hanrahan says that he used to be sceptical about the live-streaming format, but the money allows him to cover the team’s flight tickets, for instance. The organisation has never paid for promotion of content on the platforms.

At times, media organisations like the BBC buy footage from Popular Front, which allows the organisation to earn additional money. “Things are getting noticed now. We’re not against the mainstream. We just say we work alongside them but do things differently. So it’s nice when they want to collaborate with us,” Hanrahan says. In his opinion, for mainstream publishers, the most attractive thing in Popular Front is access to things that others can’t get. For instance, someone in the group would know someone or would have grown up with someone who is a cartel boss in Mexico now. Hanrahan says that the diverse backgrounds of the people he works with contribute to the authenticity and originality of the Popular Front to a large extent.

Despite that though, Popular Front doesn’t accept corporate investment. The organisation had once received an offer from the American tobacco giant Philip Morris for a paid partnership. Hanrahan refused and posted the screenshot of the email exchange on Instagram Stories with the caption: “Philip Morris is trying to sponsor us. Fuck Philip Morris”, he told The Fix. Hanrahan says that his audience liked it. Hanrahan says he had also refused to cooperate with Netflix once because the company had some conditions that would have significantly limited Hanrahan’s say in the project.

It is this set of ethics and the will to stay independent of any editorial interference that seems to be the essence of the Popular Front. That is also how the organisation keeps its community of core supporters intact and free of any unwanted elements, something that is now at the core of this small operation.

A well-moderated community

In addition to early access to new episodes, the $10 patrons of Popular Front also get invited to the Discord community. Hanrahan describes this community as “constantly chatting, diverse groups”. There are different channels including podcasts, books, music, and Ukraine’s invasion monitor hooked up to the country’s raid alerts, just like in Ukrainian Telegram channels.

While the community is dominated by people from the United States, there are others from Central and Eastern Europe as well. This community has very specific rules and violators are immediately kicked out. There can be no racism, sexism, homophobia, or political arguments in this community. Publication of someone’s personal information is not allowed, as isn’t bullying.

In one of the instances, a neo-Nazi user had paid $10 and got access to Popular Front’s Discord. The team identified him fairly quickly and banned him. Later on, the team requested the patrons to donate $10 each for a Jewish charity organisation and raised around $10,000. The amount was donated in the name of the neo-nazi. “And then we publicised it and no Nazis tried to get in again after that,” says Hanrahan. (The Fix didn’t find any reference to this case on Popular Front’s social media).

Outside of podcasts and documentaries, this well-moderated community is what is becoming the heart of Popular Front. Over the years, the Popular Front community has organised various campaigns and supported different initiatives. The organisation uses limited-edition merchandise to raise funds for different causes too. For instance, the company had dedicated a line of T-shirts with  “RIP EL CHANGUITO” text referring to a pet monkey who belonged to the La Familia Michoacána drug cartel in Mexico; the monkey was killed during a shoot-out in June 2022. Popular Front collected £13,365 and donated it all to the animal charity World Wildlife Fund Mexico. 

£10,000 was collected for the National Women’s Law Center, a charity that helps underprivileged women fight legal battles, by selling “Authoritarianism is toxic. Free Britney” T-shirts during Britney Spears’ fight against conservatorship in 2021. In 2022, Popular Front did charity screenings of the documentary “Frontline Hooligans” in Europe and the United States to support Ukrainian Hoods Hoods Klan, an anti-fascist football hooligan group. The firm is also associated with the “Arsenal Kyiv” football club, whose members are now fighting Russia’s invading forces. In the first year of the Russian invasion, Popular Front had donated £10,000 to Ukraine, Hanrahan says.

Popular Front also worked with a big American independent media project Channel 5 on the production of a story about the impact of the Russian war on the lives of Ukrainian civilians. The video “War in Ukraine” published in April 2022 gained 3 million views on YouTube.

Hanrahan says there were concerns around his projects raising funds for these cases, but he didn’t care.  “We wanted to put the soul back into journalism…  I’m a human being and if I help some people that I consider friends, it’s okay. There is a line, of course, but I don’t think we ever crossed it,” Hanharan says.

It’s not that cutting through the noise has been an easy task for Hanrahan and the Popular Front. Apart from the usual challenges of limited finances and competing with mainstream media publications, initiatives like Popular Front frequently face obstructions in their pursuit to reach and appeal to wider audiences. 

Fight for the reach

On almost every online platform, Popular Front has had to face its fair share of problems. On YouTube for instance, if you’re a creator, you can apply for the partnership program with the platform. However, if you cover conflicts, there are caveats. Creators must meet advertiser-friendly content guidelines to be eligible for monetisation on YouTube. Harmful or dangerous acts, controversial issues, firearms-related content, sensitive events – all of these can lead to a limitation or cancellation of monetisation processes. For a while, Popular Front has struggled with this. 

Finally, YouTube recently allowed partial monetisation of Popular Front’s content. Hanrahan describes limits on monetization as “disgusting” in a conversation with The Fix: “Eventually, we spoke to someone from YouTube. They looked at our content and said, you know what? This is proper journalism. We said, yeah, of course. That’s what we’ve been telling you”. The documentaries posted on YouTube bring around £200 monthly, which is actually nothing, says Hanrahan.

On Instagram too, the Popular Front handle, every now and then, sees partial blocking of some features because of the content rules of the platform. At one point, Instagram had turned off Popular Front’s ability to send messages to some accounts, as well as to reply to messages and comments; certain posts have also been deleted by Instagram in the past. In November 2019, while reporting on Turkish war crimes and police brutality in Hong Kong, Popular Front was temporarily labelled by Instagram as a ”sharing partly false information account”. 

And then there are real-world challenges too. In early 2020, Popular Front’s website was banned in Turkey, which had not changed until the publishing of this article. In the autumn of 2015, Hanrahan with his two British and Iraqi colleagues was arrested and put in a Turkish high-security prison under terrorism charges. This happened after Hanrahan and his team filmed the clashes between the police and young members of the pro-Kurdistan Workers’ Party; Hanrahan spent 11 days in detention.

Despite everything though, Popular Front has managed to gain followers (450,000 as of mid-April 2023) on Instagram as well as on YouTube (about 154,000). Twitter is the third-largest platform for Popular Front, where the initiative has 61,500 subscribers. Going forward, Popular Front has quite a few plans. It has upgraded its online store and wants to organise fundraisers for new documentaries. At the end of March, the organisation also launched a Popular Front Mexico Instagram account @pf_mx, reporting on the local narcotics wars in English and Spanish. In just 2 weeks it has gained more than 19,000 subscribers.

“I feel like it’s very unfair to pick and choose who you report on in a war,” says Hanrahan. “Everybody should get attention. Everybody is dying and suffering. You shouldn’t only report on the people you like from any side. We were like, okay, there’s literally about a thousand anarchists and anti-fascists, there are vegan fighters and no one wants to talk about them.  So we said, fuck it, we’ll do that.  And I think that’s where we thrive, in places where there’s a gap.”

Personally, Hanrahan plans to delegate his responsibilities and launch another project – Bando, a quarterly print magazine about underground culture, which will be separate from Popular Front. The idea is to expand on the conflict reportage that is the foundation of his Popular Front. Hanrahan says he doesn’t have the ambition to get bigger and compete with mainstream publications, largely because he accepts the reality of financial constraints. He also knows that limited budgets allow him to act as independently as possible. “We’ll never be first,” he says. “You know, we can’t be first. We don’t have the right money. But I think we can always be different.”

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