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Geneva -- Teaching journalists to investigate is all very well. What we really need are more news organizations willing to print the truth, and innovative ways of using what we already know.

So what exactly should you expect from a Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC) on 22-25 April in Geneva, home of a particularly sycophantic kind of reporting in a country whose newspapers largely keep to the political line of the parties that support them?

Well, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker has promised to come on 23 April. Mr My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib exposer, he has the right to claim ownership of the Investigative Journalism crown if anyone does. The provisional programme for the sixth GIJC, three-and-a-half days of teach-ins, panels and debates, features banking and financial issues "due to general demand". How to investigate the Swiss banking system and its institutions? And in the home of the International Olympic Committee, rated one of the most obscurantist international bodies, how can journalists dig deeper into sports stories?

The conference will try to provide some of the answers. Its parallel sessions also promise to tell journalists about the investigative funds becoming available in Europe, computer-assisted reporting, setting up an investigative desk, getting confidential documents from the CIA, how to analyse a website, how to finance your investigations, how to breed investigative reporters, using Excel, story-based inquiry using a UNESCO-sponsored manual, undercover TV and much more.

And that's just the first day. What I have left out are a host of sessions with the people responsible for some of the juciest investigative reporting of our time: on climate change negaters, corruption in China, the UBS scandal (it doesn't say which one), the Ivory Coast waste exposé, the Somali piracy network uncovered by a Nairobi journalist who went undercover in a brothel, terrorist mentors, war "consultants" and their links with the arms industry, Russian oligarchs, corruption in African football, and the Moroccan royal family.

All this before Hersh is due to speak one word. On any count, GCIJ offers an impressive line-up. It will make two awards: the third Global Shining Light Award and the Daniel Pearl Award, renamed in 2008 by the US-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in memory of the secular Jewish reporter kidnapped and murdered by Muslim extremists in Pakistan.

I can imagine that for most reporters, the Geneva conference is a tempting prospect, not least because it can give them valuable contacts and openings for their work. But there I have a problem. I would never call myself an investigative reporter. When I was reporting for newspapers, magazines and Reuters News Agency, my goal was always to offer readers at least some facts they could not get from any other source. In one sense every article was a scoop, but that's not how I saw it. It just seemed that journalistic survival (for me and for my publishers) depended on making my contribution to a story different from my colleagues'.

As co-publisher and managing editor of Crosslines Global Report on humanitarian affairs in the 1990s, however, I knew a lot of journalists who could have called themselves investigative journalists if they'd wanted. None of them did. But many of them were freelance reporters. We paid them. It wasn't much (we published on less than a shoe string and ended up giving away our shoes) but our rates were better than The Guardian or The International Herald Tribune at the time. We also received contributions for free from a number of staff journalists who knew that their own organizations had no opening for their stories.

The troubling aspect to this conference is that star-studded and meaty though it promises to be, it costs CHF500 to register (Geneva hotel costs are extra). For most freelances, desperate for new outlets for their work, it is more than they could spend simply out of interest. It is more than I could have made in a normal month selling stories to The Guardian, for example, and the rates have apparently not improved much since.

Though the entrance fee might seem good for three days including meals, it is likely to exclude some of the most eager participants. For a freelance with a family to keep, it would feel self-indulgent to blow the grocery budget for the week on what could turn out to be a gabfest. I can't attend because I am away from Geneva on 22-25 April.

I thought of giving the money to an unemployed friend here who has spent her reporting life on unwritten stories, but then realized the fee would gulp down nearly one third of my Swiss pension. Perhaps her welfare service will take care of it. That's the reality for freelance journalists hidden by the hype of Swiss prosperity.

The conference organizers have tried to go part of the way by offering 100 grants (all allocated, sorry) to developing country journalists. But I am not sure how much that will help. At Crosslines we were berated once by a reporting agency specializing in developing country stories. "Why don't you use more Third World journalists?" we were asked. The answer was simple: journalists from the richer world could fly in and out without too great a risk and report frankly on the situation once they were outside the country.

Using a local journalist to write the same story could have condemned them to death, as the Reporters Without Borders website makes clear with its running list of journalists attacked. Some really well-funded newspapers were apparently willing to allow freelance journalists to risk their skins without insurance, but we would not ask them to. To fund the legwork required in researching stories, we helped set up the International Centre for Humanitarian Reporting, where interested organizations could channel grants at arm's length.

ICHR also organized smaller conferences (eg. The Weapons of War, Tools of Peace Conference which for the first time brought together over 300 media, humanitarian, military and private sector representatives in Geneva in the mid-1990s) on the same kind of topics as GIJC, designed to increase understanding between journalists and organizations. But we never charged for participation, no matter how useful the contacts (and we focused on working programme officers as well as committed journalists). As a result, we never knew when we would cover the budget for the meeting until the last minute (and sometimes after that the conference had started). But participation was always good, and exchanges led to a number of partnerships. Furthermore, the ICHR, which later became Media Action International (MAI), organized workshops and conferences for a fraction of the cost of the now defunct Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva, which the Swiss funded at exorbitant cost before it decided what the Forum's true role should be. The Swiss provided only very paltry funds to MAI initiatives despite its impressive achievements for helping put Geneva and journalism on the map humanitarian-wise.

Anyone with a press card could walk through the doors and take part. GIJC seems designed for news organizations to send their young reporters to learn the trade (no bad thing in itself) but there's no guarantee that these organizations will then go on to develop the fearless journalism that Seymour Hersh exemplifies. The collapse of the U.K.Sunday Times Insight Team from Harold Evans to Rupert Murdoch (see Nick Davies, Flat Earth News, Vintage 2009, 275-6) suggests that investigatory techniques these days have gone well beyond the legal -- hiring non-journalistic investigators as consultants to gain illegal access to information.

British "privacy" laws are now so draconian that even national newspapers cannot afford to fight injunctions against publication that are routinely delivered and cost CHF1.5 million each time to challenge. Switzerland has seen its own cases where "investigative journalism" has been squashed by the courts in the name of the rich. I'm not even sure whether I am allowed to tell you which (and I do not believe that reporters should be allowed to continually repeat a libel so long as they say it was judged to be slanderous or a lie).

The sad fact is that "investigative journalism" rarely results in a circulation boost for the news organization, one reason why it is so rare. We remember the few successes and forget the many damp squibs that cost just as much time and effort to put together. The British Parliamentary expenses scandal was pursued for years by a U.S. freelance in London before Daily Telegraph bought a leaked disk containing four years of expenses claims that had been touted around the press for weeks (Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party, Viking/Penguin 2010, p645).

The other disquieting fact of investigatory life is that even exposure rarely has an impact. Bruce Page, head of the Sunday Times Insight team became convinced that news organizations could not have a decisive impact on any issue of public life (Pilger 378, see details below). In Britain since 1970 the odds have become even tougher for campaigning journalists. And many of the scandals happen out of sight of the viewing and reading public, as the My Lai story indicates (details below).

Sometimes this sheer indifference to what goes on outside our borders is all that is needed to ensure a story never gets told. In 1996 we ran an article in Crosslines Global Report (18-19 p48-9), supplied for free by a business magazine reporter, about the close relations between U.S.-based gold extractor Freeport McMoRan and the Indonesian military in West Papua (Irian Jaya). The native Amungme were losing control of their ancestral lands so that one of the world's largest gold mines could be established. Crosslines editor Edward Girardet, now Essential Edge editor, was denied access to the region on assignment to make a documentary television programme.

Ten years later, Ray Bonner (almost as active as Hersh) was writing very much the same story, in much more detail, in The New York Times. I see now that Peoples close to Nature were appealing to President Obama to raise the issue during his March 2010 visit to Indonesia, now re-scheduled for June. The Amungme have been demanding $30 billion from McMoRan in a suit that came to court in October 2009 and again in March 2010. All previous cases in Indonesian and U.S. courts have failed "due to the inability of the plaintiffs to present facts to support their allegations" according to Freeport. In February 2010 there were photos of Amungme tribesmen gathered to confront others in a dispute and reports of quarrels with those who had not benefited from Freeport largesse under a 2000 agreement.

What's the situation now? I have no idea. Stories surface irregularly without follow-up or explanation. The truth is still out there waiting for the front pages to take notice. (See list of links about Freeport and the Amungme in the NewsFile section of crosslines.ch). With so little evidence of "investigative journalism" producing real results+.

I've been turning more and more to a study of innovative uses of journalistic techniques to create a new relationship with readers or use new technologies to provide a more informative and interactive experience for communities.

This means more than supplanting the "investigative journalist" with the "citizen reporter". For example – and I am not promoting the European Graduate School but speaking from my knowledge of students – one U.S. High School teacher taking his Ph.D. at EGS encouraged his pupils in upper state New York to make their own television programme. They chose to focus on the toxic waste that was turning up on the roadsides, and discovered that it came from New York in Mafia-controlled trucks, with the complicity of the local sheriff (all on camera). That was over 10 years ago, but I see the Ivory Coast waste scandal is being presented several times at the conference as a triumph of investigative journalism. The U.S. teacher Fred Isseks offered something more to his students and the community.

More recently, another student at EGS, a working artist, is co-sponsoring a project to send directions to illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico to California by cellphone, informing them of the nearest place to find water. So I wish the conference participants good talk, good networking, and lots of mutual recognition among people doing a difficult job. But I also wish it looked less like a Big Boys Bash and more of a get-together of working stiffs. If only that impressive list of sponsors had opened their purses a bit wider to ensure that a lot more of the journalists who could really have used this unique opportunity would be able to take advantage of what the conference has to offer.

*   *   *

* John Pilger, no mean reporter himself, has put together a terrific 600-page collection of English-language "investigative journalism" from Martha Gellhorn and Wilfred Burchett to Anna Politkovskaya and Robert Fisk in Tell Me No Lies (2005), Vintage, in paperback. In his introduction to Hersh's My Lai report Pilger reminds us that a discharged GI, Ron Ridenhour, tried to interest the American press at home and in Saigon without success. Hersh was a freelancer at the time. In November 1969 he saw a small press ageny item about the charging of Lt. William Calley with the murder of 109 'Oriental human beings'. He interviewed Calley and more than 50 members of the company, covering more than 80,000 km. He wrote a reconstruction of the atrocity for the little-known Dispatch News Service in 1970. US coverage of the issues was as "An American Tragedy" (Newsweek) that called for sympathy, and Calley did not serve a day in prison (86).

As a side note, my radio station referred to the so-called My Lai massacre, because the killing actually took place at Song My village. We still don't know how many really died. The Vietnamese government, according to wikipedia, lists 504 killed. The U.S. army counts only those at My Lai (347), not the others at My Khe in Song My. This takes nothing away from Hersh, whose other scoops over 40 years include the secret bombing of Cambodia, the illegal use of the CIA to spy on Americans at home, key events in Watergate, particularly the White House phone-tapping, and the role of the CIA and Henry Kissinger in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. Pilger calls him, with no exaggeration, "America's greatest reporter".

As for investigative journalism, Pilger widens the definition in his book and includes journalism that "bears witness and investigates ideas", providing some of the most inspiring chapters. + The former Insight Report Phillip Knightley says: "It has taken me 20 years to face up to the fact that the Sunday Times thalidomide campaign [that made the reputation of Harold Evans and investigative journalism in the U.K.] was not the great success it was made out to be" (Pilger 359). As Evans has always acknowledged, actuary John Prevett had already written two critical articles in the Modern Law Review because he was outraged by a court decision on assessing compensation for a thalidomide victim in 1968-9.

The articles basically reflected what he had said in the witness box (all the proceedings were in open court) and he wrote the pieces because no journalists seemed interested (362).

Peter Hulm is Advisor on Innovative Journalism to the European Graduate School for Multidisciplinary Studies (Saas-Fee/New York). He was co-publisher and managing editor of Crosslines Global Report and maintains the crosslines.ch website.