Journalists often seek sensitive information for the purposes of their work. They use the Access to Public Information Act (APIA) and public sources of information (public registers and government data sets) to obtain documents and data which often reveal wrongdoings or corruption of government officials.

Most often, journalists seek information related to the decision-making process, public money spending, procurement contracts, results from inspections over the activities of different types of institutions from central government bodies, but also from municipalities and other bodies obliged under the APIA.

Since the beginning of its work, the AIP has been providing legal help to journalists in their search for information in different stages – formulation of requests, strategy-building for the filing of requests to different institutions, challenging access to information refusals before the court and provision of legal representation in court.

Journalistic investigations supported by AIP resulted in hundreds of media publications covering different cases of public interest.

At the end of 2014, AIP ran a competition for journalistic investigations with the purpose to support also financially the work of journalists in revealing facts about issues of public interest, which are often out of the focus of a thorough investigation due to scarce resources. The competition was held within the implementation of the project Civil Center for Support of Transparency in Public Life supported by a grant from the America for Bulgaria Foundation.

In this section we publish the articles produced as a result of the supported investigations, the documents obtained by using the APIA, as well as the public effect from the revealing of facts on specific topics in the media.