The point is that, with the new technologies and this thing called globalization, there are new possibilities and opportunities for innovation. All of us here today find ourselves at the dawn of an exciting new age of international investigative reporting. Now, the most talented journalists around the world can simultaneously investigate the most important global issues of our time, collaborating across borders, transcending the traditional geographical, cultural, language and other traditional barriers to journalistic partnerships. The new editorial challenges to provide readers, viewers and browsers with an international perspective on practically every major subject today mean that news organizations will find ways, must find ways to get over their normal, competitive obsessions. It is not normal to investigate a difficult subject for months or years, to investigate people or organizations that operate illegally, secretly and kill for a living, to face personal rejection literally on a daily basis.
Investigative reporters are, by nature, suspicious and even somewhat paranoid.
But in this new age, at this conference and beyond, we must learn to drop our inhibitions and our usual competitive resistance to collaboration with our journalistic colleagues. We must build up trust and rapport with like-minded professionals elsewhere in the world. The first international investigative reporting conference I attended was back in Moscow in 1992. And the great journalist Phillip Knightley who has been a working reporter for more than 50 years told how he had tackled a tough investigative assignment by calling up reporters in different cities around the world. Together, they traded and stitched together information across borders, and all of them broadened their range of knowledge and context.