AEJ-Bulgaria

AEJ: Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder case acquittal leaves justice unfinished and impunity unchallenged

AEJ — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:12:22 +0000

By Irina Nedeva – Vice-president of AEJ and Special Representative on Media Freedom within the organization

The Association of European Journalists (AEJ) joins the outrage of the international press freedom community at the acquittal of Yorgen Fenech in the trial concerning the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

On 2 September 2026, a Maltese jury found Fenech not guilty, by eight votes to one, of complicity in Daphne’s murder and of criminal association. The verdict, delivered nearly nine years after Daphne was killed in a car bomb attack, represents a devastating setback in the pursuit of full accountability for one of the most shocking assassinations of a journalist in Europe.

The verdict therefore leaves unanswered the central question of who ultimately commissioned the assassination and highlights the continuing failure to establish full accountability for the murder of a journalist.

The reaction from the international press-freedom community reflects the gravity of the situation.

“We are beyond outraged. The verdict means that almost nine years since the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese authorities have failed to identify and convict the mastermind,” said Pavol Szalai, Director of the Prague Bureau of Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Szalai added: “We stand in solidarity with the journalist’s family, which first suffered from Daphne’s loss and then painfully fought for justice only to learn that the man charged with ordering the assassination has been judged not guilty. Full justice must be served and Maltese authorities must implement the long overdue measures protecting journalists and media freedom — the absence of these measures contributed to Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, as concluded by the public inquiry into the crime five years ago.”

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has also condemned the outcome. EFJ President Maja Sever said:

“This court ruling amounts, quite simply, to denying justice not only to Daphne’s family, but also to the hundreds of thousands of journalists around the world who suffer as a result of the widespread impunity for crimes committed against their colleagues.”

Sever added: “The matter cannot end here. The Maltese justice system has a responsibility to ensure that the mastermind is sentenced to the prison term he deserves. The Maltese authorities are also responsible for the institutional failures that allowed this murder to take place.”

The International Press Institute (IPI) describs the acquittal as a “devastating setback” in the fight for justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia. IPI stressed that the verdict represents a major blow to efforts to combat impunity for crimes against journalists.

AEJ shares the outrage and concern expressed by the international press-freedom organisations. Nearly nine years after Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated, full justice remains elusive. The Maltese authorities must pursue every remaining avenue to establish responsibility for her murder and must finally implement the reforms needed to protect journalists and media freedom.

Daphne was murdered because she was a journalist doing her job — investigating corruption, exposing abuses of power and holding the powerful to account. Her assassination was therefore not only an attack on one journalist and her family. It was an attack on journalism itself, on the public’s right to know and on the rule of law.

Justice for Daphne remains unfinished.

A journalist was murdered. The search for truth and accountability must not end here.

New Horizons in Journalism 2026: Truth Under Pressure

АЕЖ — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:48:15 +0000

Highlights from the Sixth New Horizons in Journalism Conference in Sofia. Part 2

Desislava Leshtarska

The second part of the New Horizons in Journalism conference, organized by the World Press Institute (WPI) in partnership with the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF) and the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria), focuses on a deeper, structural question: What is journalism compromising – and what compromises must it give up in order to continue to exist?

Three sessions framed the answer: a global keynote on the link between censorship and corruption, a personal account of reporting from war zones, and a panel on the daily compromises of newsroom life.

Press freedom is not abstract

Robert Guest, deputy editor of The Economist, opened the afternoon by projecting a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night. South Korea: a constellation of light. North Korea: near-total darkness. Two countries, he reminded the room, share five thousand years of culture and history and were divided only in 1950 — yet South Korea is now roughly twenty to thirty times richer than its neighbor. “Times, not percent,” Guest said. “If anyone ever tells you free speech doesn’t matter, show them this map.”

His starting point was an Economist study of 180 countries over eight decades, which found a measurable predictive relationship — what economists call Granger causality — between media freedom and corruption. When the press is constrained, corruption begins to rise within roughly four years; the lag is politically convenient, because a leader can clamp down on critical coverage now and let voters discover the resulting graft only after the next election. The relationship runs in both directions, he noted: rising corruption also predicts a tightening of censorship, because rulers have more to hide. Populism, he argued, sits at the center of the dynamic, weakening the courts and bureaucracies that hold both in check.

Guest sketched three contemporary tools of press suppression. The first is rhetorical: Argentina’s president telling crowds that “we don’t hate journalists enough,” India’s critical reporters labeled “presstitutes” by the ruling party, and President Trump publishing lists of “dishonest journalists” with names and photographs on the White House website. UNESCO data, he noted, finds that three-quarters of female journalists have received online abuse; in India, AI-generated images of Muslim women journalists have been auctioned online as “sex slaves.” The second tool is legal: civil libel suits filed not to win but to drain reporters financially — including Trump’s billion-dollar claims over reporting that is both true and in the public interest, and the experience of the editor of Serbia’s Krik, who has been investigated for tax fraud thirty times and spends five days a month in court. The third tool is economic: state advertising directed only to friendly outlets, companies pressured not to advertise with critical ones, and oligarchs buying struggling newspapers “not for profit, but to please the government in exchange for public contracts.” Hungary and Turkey, he said, offer the textbook cases.

The American press itself, Guest acknowledged, is largely protected by the country’s federalism, independent courts, the First Amendment and a competitive media market. The Trump administration’s most consequential effect on journalism is global: the State Department has stopped subsidizing independent media abroad and stopped pressing foreign leaders to release jailed journalists. The signal carried fast. In Azerbaijan, Guest said, the president jailed roughly one hundred journalists — effectively the country’s entire dissident media ecosystem — within days of the new administration’s inauguration. AI is widening the channel. Iran has been distributing Lego-style animated videos critical of Trump, scored with rap and “feeling very American”; one received more than a billion views in its first month and, on closer inspection, was carrying anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories. Europe, he added, should not assume the problem is foreign: Germany maintains laws against insulting politicians, Britain arrests roughly thirty people a day under a “grossly offensive” speech statute, and more than a dozen European countries still have anti-blasphemy laws on the books. “If you tell people they have a right not to be offended,” he said, “you’re giving them a weapon.”

He closed with what he called the Hungarian endgame. Viktor Orbán controlled Hungarian media for sixteen years, and his allies became the country’s richest men; only when the European Union finally cut off funding equivalent to four percent of GDP did the corruption become legible enough for voters to act. They voted him out. “When you see a politician who wants to suppress the media,” Guest said, “nine times out of ten he’s got something to hide. And nine times out of ten, that thing is: he’s a crook.”

Conviction, not hope

Arwa Damon, the former CNN senior international correspondent who founded the children’s humanitarian organization INARA, did not, in her short talk, present herself as a war reporter. She went to Gaza four times in 2024 — not as a journalist, since journalists are not allowed in, but on humanitarian missions; in 2025 she was denied entry herself. The detail she chose from her last visit was not about the negotiations to bring soap, flour and tents, but about a moment on a bathroom floor, sobbing over a few baby mice she had tried and failed to save. “It wasn’t really about the mice,” she said. “It was about the need to just be able to do something.” She then asked the room who in it felt too much pressure; many hands rose. The emotion generated by this kind of work, she said, is itself “a weapon in the arsenal of those who do not want us to keep reporting.”

For most of her career, Damon said, she carried a belief that if people understood the human toll of war they would force change. They did not. The work of the past decade has been to dismantle that belief and replace it with something smaller and more durable — including, eventually, eye-movement desensitization therapy, which she had resisted out of fear that it would take her anger and, with it, her fire. It didn’t. “The way I was processing everything was poisoning me,” she said. “It was preventing me from fully doing my job.”

She closed with what she said is now the question she is most often asked, and her answer to it. “People ask, ‘What gives you hope?’ I don’t have hope. But I’m still doing this. Because I fundamentally believe in it. They don’t get to win. I don’t believe the victors get to be the only ones to tell the story. Even if it doesn’t change history, history has to have that record.”

What journalism won’t give up

The panel that followed turned the day’s argument inside out: from what is being done to journalism, to what journalism is doing — and not doing — to itself. The moderator, Kate West, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a former broadcast journalist, opened with a statistic from her teaching. Every former student of hers who had left the profession within five years had cited the same reason: their mental health. “Gen Z is not less passionate,” she said. “They are less willing to silently absorb the cost.” That, she argued, was a reason to change newsroom culture, not a reason to dismiss a generation.

Catarina Carvalho, who five years ago left Diário de Notícias — Portugal’s oldest newspaper — to co-found the Lisbon hyperlocal Mensagem de Lisboa, offered one model of the change. The outlet defines itself as “neighbors in a city”: one story a day, no politicians on the page unless interviewed by ordinary residents, dinners with readers, a weekly chronicle by a man who lives on the street. It runs as a small for-profit company funded by grants, sponsorships and live events; the journalist, she said, now has to be also a fundraiser. Asked why she left, Carvalho turned the question to the profession. “We wanted connections with the powerful, not with people living on the streets,” she said. “Journalists are very vain. We think we are the power because we speak to power. We’re not.” The reward, she added, was a different kind of freedom: “Not free to do what I want — free because I feel people are asking me to do this.”

Damon pushed back, mildly, on the mental-health framing. “There’s a bit too much room being created for ‘I can’t do this,'” she said. The reframe she proposed was routine over toughness: build newsrooms that give journalists the tools to get through a hard day without further harm, and treat the work of handling one’s mental state as one would treat a headache. “I take an aspirin and get through my day. I need to be able to handle my mental health and still get through my day.”

Bisera Zankova, a Bulgarian media-regulation lawyer, supplied the missing institutional piece. A decade ago, she said, proposals to extend the Criminal Code’s protections to journalists — as they exist for doctors and teachers — found no interest in the Bulgarian parliament or government. UNESCO data, she added, shows journalism has the shortest career duration of any profession. “For many years we concentrated on media as institutions,” Zankova said. “But we missed what a journalist actually is — their mind, their feelings, their personal problems. That niche, between the institutional and the personal, is what we have to fill in.”

Asked at the close what each would refuse to surrender, the panelists answered briefly. Damon: integrity — being able to stand behind anything attached to her name. Carvalho: joy, and the sense that a story is connected to the moment one is living in. Zankova, returning to the conference’s title: the search for truth. “At the core of freedom of expression is the search for truth,” she said. “Let’s put our soul in it.”

The conference closed with a brief reflection from Camila Bath of the World Press Institute. “The pressures we create for ourselves,” she said, “don’t require funding or international coalitions. They require honesty and willingness to look at ourselves as clearly as we look at the systems and people we cover.”

New Horizons in Journalism 2026: Truth Under Pressure

АЕЖ — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:07:31 +0000

Highlights from the sixth “New Horizons in Journalism” conference in Sofia. Part 1.

In an age of editorial pressure, blocked broadcasts and AI-driven disinformation, the sixth edition of “New Horizons in Journalism,” held on May 14 at the Hilton Sofia under the theme “Truth Under Pressure,” became a working meeting on the state of independent reporting. The day’s sessions returned, again and again, to a single working assumption: that journalism today is rarely silenced by overt censorship, but eroded through ownership, advertising, political proximity and small editorial compromises. The conference is organized by the World Press Institute (WPI) in partnership with the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF) and the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria).

The hard path

The conference was convened, for the sixth consecutive year, by the World Press Institute (WPI), the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria) and the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF). Nancy Schiller, president and chief executive of ABF, opened with an anecdote from more than 30 years ago, when a senior U.S. congressman dismissed her employer’s factual defense in a civil lawsuit. “I don’t care about the truth,” she recalled him saying. “Perception is reality.” From that exchange she drew a line to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” to a 9,500-percent surge in sales of Orwell’s 1984, and on to today’s environment of algorithmic disinformation. The foundation, she said, has supported independent journalism in Bulgaria for seventeen years not as a cultural project but as democratic infrastructure: “Our democracies depend on it. The need for quality journalism has never been greater, and your task has never been more challenging.”

Maria Cheresheva, speaking for AEJ-Bulgaria, addressed the room and rejected a piece of advice put to her the night before — that journalists sometimes need to mislead in order to reach the truth. “As a journalist I cannot agree with this,” she said. “We have chosen the hard path.” In the days before the conference, AEJ-Bulgaria had temporarily renamed Sofia’s “Journalist Square” — the small plaza marked by a statue of the dissident Georgi Markov — as “Censored Square,” to make self-censorship, in her phrase, “more visible.” The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 130 killings of journalists worldwide last year, the highest figure on record; that level of violence, she said, Bulgaria does not face, but Bulgarian censorship operates instead as “something in the shadows, something we know is there but cannot explain or show.” Small businesses around the square — a florist, a bakery, a locksmith — had given over their own advertising panels for the campaign and asked that the messages remain up through the month. “People want the truth,” she said. “They don’t run from it. They run from being misled and lied to.”

David McDonald, executive chair of the World Press Institute, placed the day in a six-year arc that began in Sofia in 2021. Past editions, he said, had taken on journalism in the internet age, disinformation, artificial intelligence, global elections and the question of who gets to tell a story; “Truth Under Pressure” drew on each of them. WPI itself, founded in Minneapolis–Saint Paul more than sixty years ago, runs an annual two-month fellowship in the United States that has now passed 600 alumni from more than 100 countries. With support from the America for Bulgaria Foundation, a Bulgarian journalist has joined every cohort for the past twelve years; the outgoing 2025 fellow, Ivana Georgiev, took the stage to introduce her 2026 successor, a foreign-news editor at bTV. McDonald also noted that his home city had returned to the international news cycle this year — both for the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and for federal immigration raids that left two U.S. citizens dead — in ways the morning’s later speakers would address directly.

Off air, but not silent

The morning’s first short talk came from Maria Tsantsarova, a former bTV anchor who was taken off air in December 2025, immediately after a morning broadcast that turned out to be her last. She had asked, in her own description, “too many questions, demanded arguments for editorial decisions, defended the opposition’s right to airtime.” Bulgarian censorship, she said, rarely arrives as a direct ban; it works through smaller editorial decisions — “this topic isn’t interesting,” “too complex for people,” “we can’t have the opposition without the government” — until certain stories simply stop appearing. What surprised her, she told the conference, was not the dismissal itself but what followed: colleagues at competing outlets covered her case, viewers drifted away from the broadcaster, and the company “began to lose its most important asset — the trust of its audience.”

In mid-February 2026, with several respected colleagues, she co-founded the Foundation for Independent Journalism and its platform “Извън ефир” — “Off Air” — funded entirely by audience donations. “Our only boss is our audience,” she said. Within weeks the platform hosted what she described as Bulgaria’s only genuine pre-election debate, drawing more than two million views — beyond the reach of any national television station — and the next day published an investigation into dependencies inside the judicial system that prompted a government response within 24 hours. “Journalists like us make big media visible,” she said. “We don’t need big media to be visible.”

The morning keynote that followed extended the same problem to a global scale. Steven Capus, president and chief executive of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, told the conference that “this is a time of information warfare, and the good guys are losing some precious ground.” In Iran, he said, what he described as the most successful internet blockade ever attempted has now been in place for more than three months: the network’s Persian service, Radio Farda, lost ninety percent of its social-media audience overnight and now reaches Iranian audiences mainly through shortwave, AM and satellite. Russia has blocked 8,700 websites and seven VPN protocols, but Russians still downloaded 9.2 million VPNs in March alone. In China, the Great Firewall now monitors more than 10,000 websites using artificial intelligence and deep-packet inspection.

The cost to RFE/RL has been severe. After months of court battles and bipartisan advocacy, President Trump eventually signed a reduced funding bill; the 75-year-old broadcaster lost roughly a third of its budget as a result, and has closed its Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian and Pakistani services. New private foundations in the Czech Republic and Ukraine are continuing parts of the work, and the former head of RFE/RL’s Bulgarian service, Ivan Bedrov, now runs an independent investigative organization in Bulgaria.

Today, free media across Europe face severe funding shortages while authoritarian regimes wage a massive information war. In countries like Iran, Russia, and China, internet blackouts and censorship are not just a technological inconvenience, but a weapon used to cover up repression and violence. In this aggressive environment, circumvention tools—such as VPNs, encrypted messaging, and satellite internet—are no longer a luxury or a consumer preference, but a vital “infrastructure of resistance” that is as critical to freedom as artillery is in physical combat. Even the best journalism is meaningless if it cannot reach the people, and the cost is immense: right now, numerous journalists are sitting in prison cells just for doing their jobs.

To counter this pressure, there is an urgent need for increased funding for independent media and protective technologies, including through public-private partnerships. A free press is never a given, it is democracy itself; therefore, building secure distribution tools is the only way forward. Ultimately, just as decades of combined pressure from journalists and dissidents brought down the Berlin Wall, today’s digital walls will also fall, provided we all keep pushing hard together—because failure is not an option.

The hollowed center

David Schultz, professor of political science at Hamline University in Minneapolis, brought a long view to the morning’s middle stretch. In 1976, he said, U.S. public opinion formed a near-perfect bell curve: centrist candidates, 120 swing congressional districts, 10 to 15 percent persuadable voters and a steady stream of bipartisan legislation. By 2026, that distribution has hollowed into two narrow peaks — roughly 30 to 40 swing districts remain, and the share of genuinely persuadable voters is closer to zero to five percent.

The drivers, Schultz argued, are economic restructuring, generational turnover and the transformation of media from broadcast to social: news that once reached everyone now reaches the like-minded. “You tell me you drive a Subaru, I know exactly how you vote,” he said.

In that environment, the November midterm elections become harder to predict than the historical pattern alone would suggest. President Trump’s approval rating, in the mid-thirties, would normally point to a Democratic blue wave; but the Democratic Party, Schultz noted, carries a 60 percent unfavorable rating of its own, and is running on a single negative message — “we are not Trump” — without offering a clear alternative. The issue that will actually decide voters, he said, is basic affordability: “milk, bread, and eggs.” His forecast was cautious. A narrow Democratic majority in the House is possible, the Senate will likely end near 50–50, and even an electoral win, he warned, may not give the winning party the ability to govern.

The community as the source

John Collins, a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio, used his short talk to take the morning to Minneapolis. Earlier this year, the federal government sent roughly 4,000 immigration agents into Minnesota — population 5.5 million — compared with about 400 deployed to Chicago. Masked officers in unmarked vehicles, often without visible identification, detained people on the street, Collins said, among them green-card holders, asylum seekers and U.S. citizens. Children stopped going to school; classrooms emptied; two civilians were killed by federal agents during the operations, and the federal government has not cooperated with state prosecution.

The story he asked the room to take from Minnesota was less about the raids than about the response. Coffee shops kept boxes of whistles by the door — “ICE is here, stay inside if vulnerable, come out if not.” Signal and WhatsApp networks tracked unmarked vehicles in real time; neighbors patrolled outside schools and daycare centers. “This was not a protest,” Collins said. “This was residents using their First Amendment rights.” After weeks of sustained community resistance, he said, the administration backed down for the first time in the current term.

For local journalism, Collins argued, the lesson was uncomfortable. The federal government had labeled victims “domestic terrorists” before any facts were established, and had used AI to distort images of civil rights leaders; without independent local reporting, the official narrative would have travelled largely unchallenged. “We prioritize access to people in power over access to the community,” he told the conference, “and this must change. We’re in a pretty epic fight for democracy. We can’t just say journalism is fundamental to it anymore — we need to prove it through our actions.”

The objectivity question

The morning’s final short talk came from Pauliina Grym, a Finnish broadcaster with twenty years at the public service Yle and a current World Press Institute fellow researching activist journalism. She opened with a show of hands: who in the room believed they could be entirely objective? None rose. Objectivity, she went on, was not handed down from journalism’s founding principles but introduced as a commercial decision; in the early twentieth century the Associated Press realized that a single non-partisan version of the news could be sold more widely than competing partisan versions. “Objectivity sounds very non-capitalist,” she said, “but originally, it wasn’t.”

Her research, conducted with the independent collective Unicorn Riot during the Minneapolis protests of last summer, traced one logical destination of the alternative — explicit advocacy journalism. Unicorn Riot’s coverage of clashes with police was deliberately partial: rocks thrown at officers and police responses were filmed, vandalism and arson by protesters were not. “Police get coverage in mainstream media; they don’t need it from us,” one of its journalists told her. Another, she added, distrusts the BBC, Reuters and Western mainstream outlets so thoroughly that he prefers Russia Today — an illustration, she suggested, of how the rejection of imperfect objectivity can collapse into the embrace of state propaganda.

She closed with a thought experiment about complete transparency. If objectivity is impossible and journalists are instead obliged to reveal everything that shapes their views, what should the disclosures include? She read out one possible list: name, age, education, voting record, parents’ politics, divorce proceedings, children’s school records, sexual orientation, religion, mortgage, diet, medications, addictions, past trauma. Then she turned the list into questions for the room. “We all agree we can’t be objective. We all agree we have to say what we think,” she said. “So — who did you vote for? Who do your friends vote for? Are you married? Going through a divorce? Where would we stop?”

Common ground

In the discussion that closed the morning, moderated by Ivan Georgiev, reporter in bTV, the three international speakers converged on a single uncomfortable conclusion: the relationship between journalism and the communities it claims to serve has broken down in ways that better reporting alone cannot fix. Asked whether all journalists are by now advocates, Collins said they are: advocates for free speech, democracy, transparency and accountability. The only real question, he added, is whether journalists are prepared to acknowledge it. Grym added that distrust of mainstream media now comes from both the political left and the political right, for different reasons in each case. Mainstream journalism, she said, is losing public trust from both directions at once.

Pictures: Zdravko Yonchev

Top Bulgarian TV Anchor Taken Off Air Amid Fears of Political Interference

АЕЖ — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 13:48:22 +0000

Maria Tsantsarova, a prominent television journalist, has been taken off air from the political talk show This Morning on bTV, one of Bulgaria’s leading television channels, following weeks of speculation.

Tsantsarova, known for her tough questioning and high-profile investigations, confirmed on Monday in a Facebook post that she had been removed from the programme, contradicting a vague official statement issued by bTV on Friday. Тhe broadcaster denied any allegations regarding the removal of Tsantsarova and her colleague Yochev, describing them as false. The media company—part of the Czech-owned investment group PPF—said it was in “active talks about the development of programme content for the coming year,” allegedly “with active participation” of the journalist.

However, on Monday This Morning aired with a replacement host and the company published a more detailed statement, where it claimed that Tsantsarova has repeatedly violated a number of editorial policies and principles, but despite this, she has been offered another programme in the prime time of the television.

“The media will not succumb to external pressure and a process has been initiated to terminate relations with it her [Tsantsarova]”, it said.

News of Tsantsarova’s removal triggered a protest on Friday organised by AEJ-Bulgaria and supported by numerous prominent journalists and citizens, who gathered in front of bTV’s headquarters in an act of solidarity. The wave of solidarity continued on Monday with hundreds of publications on social media. One of bTV’s top investigative reporters, Stoyan Georgiev, announced his resignation from the media company and declared his full support for Maria Tsantsarova.

Over the past several years, Tsantsarova has been the target of repeated attacks by political figures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was also pressured by law enforcement authorities to reveal her sources for a major investigative report.

Her removal comes at a time of unprecedented civil protests that led to the government’s collapse on December 11. Bulgaria has since entered a new phase of political instability and is heading toward early parliamentary elections in the coming months. Taking a leading critical journalist off air amid widespread social unrest has raised serious concerns about possible political interference.

Over the past decade, several prominent critical voices have been removed from their positions at both private and public television broadcasters in Bulgaria.

Opaque media ownership and political influence remain among the most serious challenges facing the country’s media environment. Bulgaria fell to 70th place from 59th in this year’s Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index.

AEJ-Bulgaria’s latest press freedom survey, published in 2024, reported a record increase in political pressure on journalists. A staggering 77 percent of respondents identified political interference as the most widespread source of pressure in Bulgarian media.

New Project to Tackle Online Hate Speech Against LGBTI+ People in Bulgaria

АЕЖ — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 12:00:05 +0000

A new two-year project has been launched with the aim of countering hostility and disinformation against LGBTI+ people in the online space. The project, titled RESPONSES, is funded by the European Union under the CERV-2024-CHAR-LITI programme and will be implemented from June 2025 to May 2027.

The lead organization is GLAS Foundation, working in partnership with the Bilitis Resource Center Foundation, the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria), and the Bulgarian Society for Psychoanalysis and Group Analytic Psychotherapy (BSPGAP).

With the growing number of online hate speech incidents and manipulative narratives targeting the LGBTI+ community, RESPONSES will combine journalistic, research, and psychosocial approaches to protect the rights and dignity of those affected.

What’s next?

The project will focus on six key areas:

Research and analysis of hate narratives, disinformation trends, and perceptions within the community;
A national awareness campaign aimed at engaging the broader public on the issue;
A digital guide titled “Surfing Through Hate”, offering practical tools for recognizing and responding to online hostility;
Investigative and fact-check journalism exposing key cases of disinformation and hate speech;
Specialized training for journalists and editors on ethical and inclusive reporting;
Resilience and mental health programs, including workshops and individual support for community members.

Opportunities for Journalists

RESPONSES offers concrete opportunities for media professionals, including:

Training for 20 journalists who will specialize in covering issues related to hate speech and the LGBTI+ community;
Production of 4 investigative journalism pieces;
Fact-checking and analysis of at least 6 real-world cases of online hostility.

This approach will enable journalists to work with in-depth methodology, expert support, and tangible societal impact.

Impact in Numbers

Over 200,000 people will be reached through the awareness campaign;
20,000 members of the LGBTI+ community will gain access to educational and supportive resources;
70 individuals will receive personalized psychological support through the “Rainbow Counseling” program.

The project introduces a new model for inter-organizational collaboration in the fight against online hate — through the synergy of journalism, mental health, and activism.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or [name of the granting authority]. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Massive Public Support for Journalists Convicted in Landmark SLAPP Case in Bulgaria

АЕЖ — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 12:33:42 +0000

Bulgarian citizens have shown overwhelming solidarity with journalist Boris Mitov and independent news outlet Mediapool.bg following a controversial defamation ruling by the Supreme Court of Cassation. The decision, widely seen by press freedom advocates as a textbook example of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), has sparked national and international concern.

On Monday, the court upheld almost all claims brought by Svetlin Mihailov—former chairman of the Sofia City Court and current appellate judge—regarding a series of articles published in 2018. The court not only reversed the findings of the appellate court but increased the awarded damages fivefold. Mitov and Mediapool were ordered to pay a total of BGN 36,000 (approximately EUR 18,000) in compensation and interest, plus an additional BGN 7,200 (EUR 3,600) in legal fees.

In an extraordinary show of public support, the full amount was raised in under 24 hours through joint fundraising efforts led by Mediapool and the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria).

“AEJ wants to thank you for supporting free and critical journalism in our country. It would mean nothing without an enlightened and engaged audience. You have proven that such an audience exists in Bulgaria,” AEJ said in a public statement.

A Threat to Press Freedom

The ruling sets a troubling precedent for press freedom in Bulgaria. The five-year legal battle is viewed as a clear case of a SLAPP—aimed not at justice, but at silencing journalists and discouraging public scrutiny of those in power. Such decisions risk creating a chilling effect across the industry, particularly when reporting on judicial integrity, political connections, or ethical concerns.

AEJ-Bulgaria has urged the Ministry of Justice to act swiftly and introduce legislation transposing the EU Anti-SLAPP Directive adopted in 2024, which mandates member states to protect journalists and civil society actors from abusive litigation.

Ignoring European Standards

In its final ruling, the Supreme Court dismissed the appellate court’s view that the contested publications presented factual reporting and value-based commentary—both protected under freedom of expression. Instead, it labeled critical commentary and widely known facts about Judge Mihailov as defamatory and insulting.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has long held that public figures must tolerate a greater degree of public scrutiny. Yet the Bulgarian Supreme Court made no reference to relevant ECHR case law, nor did it acknowledge the vital role of journalism in a democratic society.

The court also accepted claims that the articles caused Mihailov emotional distress, health deterioration, and family strain—without requiring conclusive evidence that the reporting was the direct cause.

We express our profound disappointment with the Supreme Court of Cassation’s decision, which raises serious concerns about judicial impartiality—particularly when the subject of the lawsuit is a sitting magistrate.

New Horizons in Journalism: Global Voices Rally for Truth, Transparency, and Audience Connection

АЕЖ — Thu, 22 May 2025 12:20:30 +0000

At the fifth New Horizons in Journalism conference, international media leaders tackled urgent challenges facing journalism today — from the spread of disinformation and AI’s unchecked influence to the erosion of public trust and the collapse of traditional business models. The event took place in Sofia, Bulgaria in April 2025 and it was organized by the World Press Institute (WPI) and partners from the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF) and the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria (AEJ-Bulgaria).

“Who Tells the Story?” – Journalism in the Age of Influence, Disinformation, and AI

Panelists and keynote speakers called for a renewed focus on ethics, transparency, empathy, and audience connection, arguing that journalism must adapt not just technologically, but fundamentally, to remain a vital force in society.

The panel began unconventionally, with a poetic and metaphorical presentation by Graham Griffith, a veteran American audio producer. He challenged the audience to reimagine the role of journalists altogether: “What if we are not journalists, but gardeners—tending to public spaces where curiosity still lives? We don’t just report; we shape understanding, we nourish community.” He encouraged journalists to think like teachers, artists, meteorologists—even chefs—serving not just information but understanding. In an age of media distrust, he suggested transparency, not objectivity, should be journalism’s anchor: “There is no objectivity. But there can be objective processes. Like history books need footnotes, journalism needs transparency.” Griffith also warned that without action, disinformation—particularly Russian state propaganda—would continue to exploit platforms and fill every informational vacuum: “There is no news gap. The stream is constant. The question is: how do we stand out, and who do we serve?”

Zakhar Protsiuk, CEO of The Kyiv Independent, spoke from a literal war zone. For him, the stakes of storytelling were not abstract—they were existential. “News media are no longer gatekeepers. Everyone creates news now. Our strength is doing what others cannot—deep investigations, frontline reporting, context in chaos.”

He warned that staying only within echo chambers of “engaged readers” isn’t enough. If ethical journalism doesn’t reach the undecided or misled, propaganda wins: “Russia fills the gaps. If we don’t offer alternatives, we’ll be safe in our bubble—maybe even funded—but isolated, and irrelevant.”

Fauziyya Tukur, an investigative journalist with BBC Nigeria, offered a perspective from a continent both booming with content and vulnerable to misinformation. For her, the challenge is compression—telling the truth in TikTok’s attention span: “How do you debunk viral disinformation in 30 seconds? That’s what the audience wants. But can we really explain the truth that fast?”

She described how traditional media is adapting by hiring influencers—not always journalists—to reach digital audiences: “They’re hired because they have followers, not ethics. That’s the problem. Influence is not a substitute for training.”

Tukur also noted the waning trust in legacy institutions like the BBC in parts of Africa, despite their continued cultural relevance. “The BBC used to be sacred. It still reaches millions, especially through radio. But trust is no longer automatic.”

Kaius Niemi, former editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat, reflected on the long view of journalism’s struggle for survival. For him, media’s biggest threat is not just tech, but societal disregard for facts: “We’re facing a crisis of expertise. Professors, journalists—no one is seen as a real expert anymore. That’s dangerous for democracy.”

Niemi called for investment, creativity, and media startups that blend ethics with innovation. He also warned that in countries where people consume news through aggregators rather than directly from newsrooms, trust in media plummets.

What Happens If We Truly Put Our Audience at the Centre?

Camilla Bath, journalism consultant, delivered a powerful, thought-provoking keynote that redefined what journalism should mean in today’s saturated, digital world. Drawing from her personal experience launching a WhatsApp news service in South Africa, she emphasized the urgent need for journalism to reconnect with its audience—not through more content, but more meaningful content. “The problem isn’t that people don’t care about the news,” she said. “The problem is that we keep giving them something they don’t value—and then we blame them for tuning out.”

Bath argued that traditional news values—timeliness, conflict, prominence—often serve journalists more than they serve the public. Instead, she proposed a framework of three modern news values:

Make it Make Sense – Provide clarity, surprise, and meaning.
Make it Matter – Offer resonance, build community, and uphold accountability.
Make it Useful – Explain the world, offer solutions, and provide momentum.

Bath’s concept of “news therapy” exemplified her call for a more human-centric approach. She advocated for initiatives like “slow news days” or AI-assisted “choose your own news journeys,” allowing audiences to engage with stories based on their emotional or informational needs: “What if our audiences aren’t broken? What if our model is what’s broken?” She concluded with a call to journalists to become trusted companions, not just trusted sources, in people’s lives. “We need to become a part of our audience’s worlds again… That’s how journalism becomes truly alive, useful, and human.”

The Future of Journalism

Moderated by Bridget Rawlinson, the panel tackled the immense challenges facing journalism—from economic threats to AI disruption—with a sharp focus on actionable solutions.

Courtney C. Radsch, Director of the Center for Journalism & Liberty, delivered a blistering critique of AI’s unchecked influence on journalism. “Generative AI has been built on theft—on stealing our content, bypassing paywalls, and not paying for it.” She warned that unless urgent copyright reform and policy action are taken, “we have only a few years left in journalism.” Her proposed strategy included license, litigation, legislation—with emphasis on creating fair compensation systems for news content. “It’s great to talk about trust, but if you are working against monopolies that control the information ecosystem, then you’re not in control of your sustainability.”

Veronika Munk, Director of Innovation and New Markets, Denník N, started by drawing from her bold experience leading the mass walkout from Hungary’s Index and launching another journalism project called Telex. Munk shared how deep public trust and transparency saved independent journalism. “We said to people: You knew us for 20 years. Now we need your help—and they gave €1 million in three weeks.”

She also discussed a wildly successful campaign at Denník N that gained 24,000 subscribers in two weeks by making ten civic promises, like distributing newspapers to elderly homes and giving free subscriptions to first-time voters. “Transparency and public service values are key. When people understand your mission, they show up.”

Peter Erdelyi, Founding Director of the Center for Sustainable Media, emphasized the rise of lean, sustainable media models made possible by new technology. “With tools like Ghost, Substack, and newsletters, small teams can launch impactful journalism within hours and monetize it.”He praised audience revenue models while warning against rushing paywalls, advocating for slow, iterative community building. “It’s not a sprint. It takes 12–24 months for an audience to understand and support what you’re doing.” He also demystified EU funding, emphasizing the importance of staying engaged in upcoming 2028 budget negotiations.

Who Tells the Story? Journalism at a Crossroads

АЕЖ — Thu, 22 May 2025 12:01:04 +0000

Highlights from the Fifth Annual New Horizons in Journalism Conference in Sofia

In an era of rising disinformation, political pressure, and artificial intelligence, the fifth annual New Horizons in Journalism conference, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, emerged as a global call to action. The central question—“Who tells the story?”—echoed throughout the event, bringing together journalists, media leaders, and advocates committed to protecting the integrity of the profession.

A Celebration of Resilience and Storytelling

The conference opened with energy and gratitude as Zach Mullinax, Executive Director of the World Press Institute (WPI), welcomed participants. “We’re so excited to kick off our fifth annual New Horizons in Journalism conference here in Sofia,” he said, acknowledging the presence of WPI alumni and partners from the America for Bulgaria Foundation (ABF) and the Association of European Journalists (AEJ).

Desislava Taliokova of ABF addressed the heart of the event’s theme: “Who tells the story? This, in many ways, is the question of all questions in journalism today.”She highlighted the dual promise and peril of artificial intelligence, cautioning that while AI may enhance efficiency, it risks displacing the very human essence of journalism. “It is the professionalism, the passion and the integrity of journalists—of people like you—that truly makes the difference,” she affirmed.

Maria Cheresheva, president of AEJ-Bulgaria, recounted being asked to speak on resilience to American journalists. “In most of my professional career, things have been happening the other way around. I would learn from people who work in free and thriving media environments.” Now the political winds have changed and colleagues around the world need to support each other even more actively than before. Cheresheva spoke about the daily challenges faced by journalists: political pressure, economic capture, harassment, and legal intimidation. Despite these hardships, she said: “Many are still standing. And insisting on protecting our right to be the ones who tell the stories—the stories the ones in power don’t want to be heard.”

David McDonald, Chairman of WPI, reflected on the WPI fellowship’s profound impact through the years. “This will be the 60th year of our U.S. fellowship. Over 600 journalists from 100 countries have taken part,” he said and added that the experience is “not just about training—it’s experiential.”

Former WPI fellow Ralitsa Fitcheva echoed this, describing her journey that took place in 2024 through the United States as a transformative experience: “We were privileged to travel across a democratic United States, whose very existence as such is under threat right now.” For Fitcheva, the fellowship offered not just skills, but community: “We found more than just professional enrichment. We found a family.” She announced the name of the 2025 fellow from Bulgaria – Janan Dural, world news editor for the Bulgarian National Television (BNT).

Empathy as a Tool to Redefine the Role of Journalism

The conference culminated in a powerful keynote by Arwa Damon, award-winning former CNN senior correspondent and founder of the humanitarian nonprofit INARA. Drawing on 20 years in war zones, she spoke with profound emotional depth. Arwa Damon emphasized that a critical element lacking in journalism, policymaking and our collective approach to understanding the world is empathy, especially in its deeper, emotional sense. She argues that our failures stem from not appreciating emotional history—the trauma passed down through generations that shapes how individuals and societies perceive and react to the world.

Damon explains that trauma influences how DNA interacts internally, meaning no one is born as a blank slate. Our perspectives are molded by countless factors—including family, culture, and history—which affect how we process events and conflicts. “What we need to recognize as journalists is what are those factors that have already shaped our perspectives and how do we overcome the impact that they are having on us so we can be better journalists. We should be able to create better stories that can drive a deeper understanding of conflicts and of people. I believe that our biggest failure is our inability to truly understand each other and what motivates us.”

Her journey into journalism was driven by her desire to bridge understanding and combat manipulation. She stresses that “we are constantly being manipulated, all of us, every single day,” often through campaigns that dehumanize others—be it military dehumanization campaigns, propaganda, or disinformation.

A core concept she advocated is that empathy is essential for journalism because “without empathy, you cannot be open to other people’s emotional history or to their emotional journeys.” Damon underscores the importance of self-awareness for journalists: understanding our biases and emotional triggers to foster genuine storytelling. She called for journalists to include emotional histories in their reporting to better serve truth and humanity. She noted how emotional conditioning, especially when unresolved, creates mental walls that hinder empathy, and how “we need to penetrate that wall” to connect genuinely.

Damon emphasized that “news only has value in the context of humanity” and that the moral obligation of journalists extends beyond objectivity to fairness, education, and human connection. She criticized the myth of neutrality, stating, “the notion that we are neutral is a farce,” and instead advocated for “being fair,” which involves highlighting human pain and context without crossing into activism.

She explained that “truth has multiple sides,” and that understanding emotional and psychological factors—fear, trauma, manipulation—is vital for meaningful reporting. She illustrated this with examples ranging from the motivations of fighters in conflict zones to the devastating impacts of war driven by human stories and emotions. Damon reminded of the importance of language—being mindful of dehumanizing descriptors—and called on journalists to “evolve,” to move beyond traditional frameworks of objectivity, and to use empathy as a tool to redefine the role of journalism.

Crisis is a Moment of Choice

The conversation about journalism’s identity—its past and its possible futures—continued throughout the conference. Yoanna Elmy, one of Bulgaria’s rising journalistic voices, offered a stirring account of how the profession looks to those just starting out. “Journalism has become ground zero for the vocation crisis,” she said. With fewer young people entering the field and even more leaving for public relations or content creation careers, she urged older colleagues to engage with the next generation.

She advocated for embracing change while maintaining core principles rooted in people-centered journalism. The rise of influencers and content creators as part of this evolution, but traditional journalists often look down on them. Elmy stressed that crisis is a moment of choice: “Every crisis is an opportunity,” emphasizing that journalism must adapt to new mediums like the internet, which always disrupts but also enriches the industry. She encouraged journalists to think innovatively—incorporating tools like OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), explainer journalism, infographics, and podcasting—while remaining grounded in ground-level stories that focus on genuine human experiences. “What seems new is just the forgotten old,” she said, reminding the audience that the core principles of journalism—listening, empathy, storytelling—must be preserved, even if the formats evolve.

Elmy shared her own confusion when she first entered the profession in 2017, amid political chaos and shifting roles. “Was I a reporter, activist, citizen journalist, or influencer?” she asked. The question was not rhetorical. It pointed to a wider crisis of identity in the digital age—an age where, as she put it, “young people don’t have any attention span,” and where long-form pieces compete with 15-second videos for meaning.

It’s time for Bulgaria to stand up for free journalism

АЕЖ — Fri, 02 May 2025 15:16:30 +0000

Sofia, 2 May 2025

It is time Bulgaria joined the Council of Europe’s Journalists Matter campaign. It is time for the state to show that it respects and protects journalism as a pillar of democracy, not as a threat to power. This is the call of the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, 3 May. World Press Freedom Day was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly, established to remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression enshrined in Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What is the Journalists Matter campaign

“Journalists Matter” is a pan-European campaign of the Council of Europe which aims to:

Assist Member States in establishing and implementing effective national mechanisms to protect journalists;
Raise awareness of the increasing threats faced by journalists;
To facilitate cooperation between governments, journalists’ organisations and civil society;
To implement Recommendation CM/Rec(2016)4 of the Committee of Ministers on the protection of journalism and the safety of journalists.

Official campaign website: https://www.coe.int/en/web/freedom-expression/safety-of-journalists-campaign

Key documents and guides: https://www.coe.int/en/web/freedom-expression/background-documents

Bulgaria – among the last in the EU in media freedom

In 2025, Bulgaria ranks 70 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Index, announced on Friday by the international organisation.

Bulgaria dropped 11 places from its 2024 ranking due to a significant deterioration in its political score, noted Pavol Szalay, regional coordinator of Reporters Without Borders. In the EU, it now ranks 25th out of 27 member states (23rd in 2024).

He pointed out the following problems identified by his organisation:

Public and private media are under political pressure and far-right and populist politicians are stepping up their attacks on critical journalists.
Lawsuit abuse remains a serious threat to independent and sustainable journalism. In 2024, then Interior Minister Kalin Stoyanov filed a SLAPP (lawsuit against public participation – ed.) against Bird.
A journalist covering the October elections was attacked. Two separate incidents involved threats to journalists by local officials.
Russian propaganda is widespread and the existence of Radio Free Europe in Bulgaria is threatened because of the Trump administration’s decision to cut off its global funding.
No significant legal or policy reforms have been undertaken to strengthen media freedom, journalistic independence and the protection of journalists. Bulgaria is not on track to implement the European Freedom of the Media Act.

The Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria notes that the media environment in the country continues to suffer from:

Systematic insults, disrespect and attacks by political figures against journalists or media who ask uncomfortable questions of government officials
SLAPP cases against investigative journalists
lack of effective mechanisms to control transparency of media ownership and regulation against media concentration
misuse of public funding/municipal and state funds/to control editorial policy
physical and online threats that often go unpunished

Our neighbours are already acting

Romania – as early as last year, it started the creation of a “government-to-government campaign structure” that will also meet the requirements set out in the European Commission Recommendation 2021/1534 on the protection, safety and empowerment of journalists, and began meetings between non-profit media monitoring NGOs with state institutions: the Ministry of Interior (including the leadership of the gendarmerie and police), the Ministry of Justice, the Prosecutor General, the Higher Council of Mag
Croatia – introduces protocols to protect journalists at events and conducts anti-SLAPP trainings.
Ukraine – despite the war – introduces a national plan to protect journalists and establishes a coordinating committee.
Countries like Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Malta are already part of the campaign with active actions.

➡️ List of initiatives in participating countries (updated regularly)

Why should Bulgaria get involved?

Because journalists are in danger: threats against them threaten the public’s right to be informed.
Because we are part of Europe: our country has commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Because silence is complicity: refusal to act in support of journalists means tolerance of pressure and repression.

Our appeal

We call on the Bulgarian state:

Join the Journalists Matter campaign immediately;
Establish an interagency mechanism to protect journalists and defend against SLAPP cases;
Ensure transparency in media ownership and access to public funds without political pressure;
To state clearly: journalists are not enemies of the state, but defenders of democracy.

We do not want privileges. We want security, freedom and dignity in our work. It is time for Bulgaria to stand by its journalists.

Small Grants Program for Journalists

АЕЖ — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:37:40 +0000

The Bulgaria International Journalism Fellowship (BIJF) offers small grants to independent journalists and storytellers who wish to explore Bulgaria’s role in a European and global context.

The initiative is led by the American University in Bulgaria and is dedicated to shedding light on Bulgaria’s dynamic and evolving position in Europe and the world. As a member state of the European Union and NATO, Bulgaria occupies a strategic crossroads between East and West, between tradition and innovation. Despite this pivotal role, many of the country’s most compelling stories remain untold on the international stage.

The BIJF program aims to support Bulgarian journalists and storytellers in producing high-quality, independent, and fact-based journalism that reflects the complex picture of democratic processes, societal transformation, and cultural development in the country.

What types of projects does BIJF support?

Print journalism – articles, essays, investigative pieces, and in-depth analyses
Documentary and visual projects – films, photo essays, and multimedia storytelling
Audio journalism – podcasts and other audio formats
Interactive and data-driven formats – innovative digital narratives

Potential topics include geopolitical developments, economic transformations, cultural achievements, and human-interest stories that offer new perspectives on Bulgaria for international audiences.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, with the deadline for the next round of funding set for April 15.
More information is available here.