Al Jazeera veteran, Yosri Fouda, shares his experiences at last year's ARIJ conference in Amman. Photo: Lotte Dahlmann/IMS

The fourth annual conference for Arab Investigative Journalists opens in Amman on Friday, 2 December to debate the importance of in-depth reporting, as media around the world are undergoing a revolution not just of tweets and Facebook postings but of data-driven journalism

Over 250 Arab and international journalists, editors and media professors from 22 countries will discuss challenges facing investigative journalism, a rarity in the region's new rooms for a variety of political, legal, social and religious taboos.

The three-day conference is organised by the IMS-supported network Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), the only media support network promoting investigative journalism in nine countries in the Arab region through training, coaching, pre-publication legal screening and funding investigation costs.

The conference offers a rare opportunity for journalists who have worked through ARIJ in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Bahrain, Yemen and Tunisia, to share tools of their trade to inspire their Arab and Western colleagues.

- The contribution of investigative journalism to accountability, development, and democracy is now well recognized, and it has never been more important. These are the stories that matter - in-depth reports on the issues that affect our lives, said David Kaplan, one of three keynote speakers at the conference.

Kaplan will share his experience in promoting accountability and social justice by tracking crime and corruption, a global malady. Other key note speakers such as Yosri Fouda (Egypt), editor and presenter of Egypt's leading current affairs talk show "Last Word" on OnTv, will assess the future of Arab media in a region undergoing political change since the toppling of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents early 2011.

High-profile trainers

Key trainers include award-winning journalists Tim Sebastian, chairman and presenter of the Doha Debates and former presenter of BBC's "Hardtalk", Dr. Mark Hunter, professor of media at INSEAD and author and editor of the ARIJ Manual for Investigative Journalists; "A Story-based Inquiry", and Nils Hanson, chief editor of Swedish Television's investigative team "Uppdrag Granskning".

Other speakers include Britain's author and journalist Heather Brooke and Rowan Bosworth-Davies, fraud and money-laundering expert and an accomplished author and broadcaster. Brooke exposed expense accounts of members of parliament that led to the forced resignation of the first House speaker in 300 years.

Sessions at the conference tackle Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) tools, tracking information, digital source protection, crowd sourcing, using multimedia to tell the story, cross-border networking, questioning techniques,  info-graphics, safety of investigative journalists, investigating nuclear power plants and uranium enrichment facilities, and closed militant groups state institutions.

The conference is co-funded by International Media Support (IMS). For more about the conference, see ARIJ' homepage.