Does your media organisation already have a culture of using the access to information law to get information? If not, you might be the first person to start doing so and you might need to change the newsroom culture. In particular, you might need to persuade your editors and bosses that filing and pursuing access to information is not a waste to time but is a useful part of your journalistic activity. Hopefully some of the points mentioned in this Legal Leaks Toolkit will help you make those arguments.

If there seems to be a bit of resistance there are a few things that you can do which might help:

•    Take your time to inform your colleagues about the access to information law and get support for building it into newsroom strategy before bringing it up in a meeting;

•    Collect  examples from your country or from other countries about how access to information can lead to strong stories and exclusives;

•    Explain to your colleagues that access to information is not only for investigative journalists but for all reporters researching a story and for all types of media outlet;

•    Organise a training session and invite experts or the local access to information organisation to explain to your colleagues how the access to information law works and to demystify it so that it is not seen as something which will be too time-consuming (contact the Legal Leaks team for more information about that);

•    File a few requests on your own initiative, and then write stories based on them. Share the experience with your colleagues and encourage them to try to use the access to information law

•    If you have foreign correspondents in countries with strong access to information laws, talk to them about filing some requests in those countries in order to get information and also to gather positive examples of how access to information laws can result in useful stories.