Professor Wendy Bacon is a leading Australian investigative journalist and non practising media lawyer.

She worked at Channel 9 (Sunday Programme and Sixty Minutes), John Fairfax and Sons (National Times and Sun Herald) and SBS (Dateline) and won a Walkley Award for feature writing. She has a long history of campaigning around free speech issues.

Current research interests at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she is director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, includes the reporting of Asia-Pacific humanitarian and environment issues, finding innovative ways to combine investigative journalism with scholarly research and developing e-learning projects around simulation games and blogs.

She is on the advisory board of the Pacific Media Centre, a contributing editor to Pacific Journalism Review and the Sage journal Journalism, Theory, Practice and Criticism. Read more HERE

Nicky Hager is a leading New Zealand author and independent investigative journalist based in Wellington. He has written four best-selling books, lectures regularly on investigative techniques and is the New Zealand representative of the Washington-based Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

His first book was Secret Power - New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network (1996). He was one of the earliest journalists to write about the secretive ECHELON worldwide electronic spy network. As a result of this book, in 2001 he testified before the European Parliament on his research into the network.

Hager is also the author of Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-Environmental PR Campaign (co-authored with Australian journalist Bob Burton, 1999) and Seeds of Distrust: The Story of a GE Cover-up (2000) and The Hollow Men: A Study in the Politics of Deception (2006).

As Pacific correspondent for TVNZ’s ONE News, Barbara Dreaver has broken many stories, including New Zealand businessman Mark Lyon's activities in the Cook Islands and the discovery of live chemical weapons lying at the side of the road in the Solomon Islands. As well as international stories Barbara has also concentrated on investigating issues facing Pacific Islanders living in New Zealand. She has exposed a scam targeting Pacific Islands pensioners and other concerns facing the community. Barbara says she is passionate about her job because of her cultural heritage. She was born and brought up in her mother's home country of Kiribati and also spent eight years working in the Cook Islands.

"Pacific issues are barely covered in New Zealand's mainstream media,” she says. After graduating from Auckland University with a BA, Barbara began her career in journalism in 1990 as a reporter with the Rarotonga-based Cook Islands News. From there she co-owned and edited a weekly newspaper, Cook Islands Press, that won a Pacific Freedom of the Press award. She also worked for international news organisations such as AFP and Radio New Zealand International.

Also Featured:

Jim Marbrook is a leading New Zealand filmmaker whose documentaries and short films have won prizes and appeared at festivals globally. His short film Jumbo was recognised at the 1999 NZ Film Awards and has screened at festivals and on television here and overseas.

His television work has included contributions to Greenstone’s Mercury Lane and Sons for the Road, a documentary that played on TVNZ’s Artsville in 2006. The feature length documentary Dark Horse won Best Feature Documentary at the inaugural DOCNZ International documentary festival in 2005. Another feature length documentary Ko Whanganui te Awa screened on Maori Television in 2006.

In 2008, Creative New Zealand's Screen Innovation Fund awarded Marbrook a $24,900 grant , following a seed grant from the Pacific Media Centre in 2007, which is allowing him to complete his current documentary Cap Bocage, an investigative film about Indigenous land rights, the environment and mining in New Caledonia. He is also a television lecturer in the School of Communication Studies at AUT University.

Shailendra Singh, acting head of the School of Language, Arts and Media of the University of the South Pacific, who writes on the political economy of Fiji will present a paper about investigating corruption, and Patrick Matbob of the Divine Word University will speak about investigative journalism in Papua New Guinea. A special Masterclass investigative journalism course will be run for younger journalists and postgraduate student journalists involved in investigative journalism courses on the Sunday, convened by Simon Collins of the New Zealand Herald and James Hollings of Massey University. A parallel peace journalism workshop will be convened by Dr Heather Devere of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago University and Ruhksana Aslam, a leading journalist and journalism educator from Pakistan, who is researching peace journalism.

INVESTIGATIVE PHOTOJOURNALISM EXHIBITION

Also featured in the conference will be the launching of FRAMES OF WAR: Images of the Nepal Conflict 1996-2006

This exhibition of some 50 evocative images and the related book is a global inspiration to photojournalists and investigations beyond the banal and insensitive. It is the antidote to parachute journalism. As Kunda Dixiit writes in his message:

"Nepal forced me to re-learn journalism. I couldn't be just an aloof observer, this required the "journalism of attachment". To try to get the inside story and live it, not just point out the problems but present solutions. Highlight the ordeal of the people who have persevered against all odds to survive and make things better. The media doesn't just hold a mirror to society, it is the mirror. Traditional ambulance chasing body-bag journalism doesn't help us find peace. A gripping visual or soundbite, or a juicy quote may actually distort reality, because by being selective about the facts we report, we may end up telling lies."

Review of Kunda Dixit's book by Pacific Media Centre director David Robie