Building on conferences from previous years, the event will be an opportunity to hear interesting speakers, learn new skills and meet and share ideas with a wide range of people interested in investigative journalism.

Our speakers this year are:

• Jane Patterson (RNZ) & Andrea Vance (TVNZ) on the challenges of collaboratively grappling with the large amount of data from the Panama Papers and translating it across radio, TV and online stories.

• Duncan Grieve & Alex Casey (The Spinoff) discuss the challenges and motivations behind 'I Will Come Forward', plus the legal and editorial process to get the story published.

• Abi King-Jones & Alister Barry on the practicalities, challenges and rewards of feature documentary-making within a journalistic context.

• Tim McKinnel (Greenpeace) on what journalists can learn from NGO investigations.

• Kirsty Johnston (NZ Herald) on investigating bureaucracy - understanding the psyche of a government department and using it to your advantage.

• Blair Ensor & Katie Kenny (Fairfax) on the Faces of Innocents project: Creating the first known database of Kiwi kids to have died of neglect, abuse, or maltreatment since 1992, and giving them a voice.

By popular demand, we will be expanding our selection of skills-based workshops this year:

• Matt Nippert (NZ Herald) will give a crash-course in how to actually follow the money by reading financial statements, sifting official records and building spreadsheets.

• Harkanwal Singh (NZ Herald) will take you on a tour through New Zealand’s data landscape, with focus on analysing underlying data sets which (mis)inform press releases using simple tools, and the use of statistics as a science to inform stories.

• James Hollings (Massey University) takes you through some of the tools available for searching online databases presented at the 2015 Global Investigative Journalism Network conference. These include Facebook graph searching, searching Twitter, and a tour of some of the resources and techniques used by investigative journalists.

• Nicky Hager on source protection and other tricks of the trade.

• Plus more to be announced!

The conference is open to journalists, journalism students and teachers, and authors, film makers and others who are interested in or actively doing investigative journalism.

Please spread the word to anyone you think may be interested. We want an event where participants feel comfortable talking freely so it is not aimed at people involved in party politics or public relations.

Please check with us prior to registering if you are unsure.