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The nature of investigative journalism is changing and UK media law needs reform, argued editors and reporters at a House of Lords Communications Committee hearing held earlier today.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, and investigative journalists Nick Davies and Clare Sambrook discussed the problems facing journalism at the hearing held this afternoon.

First to speak were Rusbridger and Hislop who argued that the law in the UK was posing an additional threat to quality investigative journalism. Hislop attacked the tendency of UK law to overemphasise privacy rights at the expense of freedom of expression. 'It's the balance between article eight of the Human Rights Act on privacy and article ten on freedom of expression and I think article freedom of expression is losing out.' Hislop also pointed to the rising cost of confidentiality cases.

Nick Davies, the investigative journalist responsible for unearthing the phone hacking scandal and the author of Flat Earth News was also critical: 'Media law has not been constructed but allowed to grow like a family of rabbits. If I could start again I would take defamation law and throw it in the river. I would start again with a blank slate with statute law.'

He was similarly downbeat on Freedom of Information legislation. 'The FOI is a lot weaker than what we were promised and it is much weaker than its equivalent in the US.'

Rusbridger noted the growth of data journalism and social media usage for investigations over the past five years, flagging up the work done by reporter Paul Lewis of The Guardian, in particular.

'Social media will play a big part in the future of investigative journalism. 'The truth surrounding newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson's death would not have emerged without social media,' Rusbridger noted.  

The Guardian reporter in question wrote stories expressing doubts about the official accounts of the moments leading up to Tomlinson's death and then made an appeal over social media. 'In the end it was a hedge fund trader in New York who wasn't a Guardian reader who had captured the event that he was struck. Same reporter used Twitter to find witnesses of the death of Jimmy Mubenga and during the riots in London. Social media will be a big part of what we do in the future,' Rusbridger said.

Sambrook bemoaned the wasting away of regional press and the declining flow of stories emerging from the charitable sector: 'There is a clear marked aversion amongst the big charities to upset the government, then you have the problem that vast amounts of information about vital public services is vanishing behind commercial confidentiality as public services are privatised.'

Davies and Sambrook both voiced concerns about the increasing power of PR: 'When I started out 25 years ago it was unusual to encounter a PR person, then the number of PR people overtook journalists and now they are winning the information war. They choose the stories that we write,' Davies said.

Sambrook highlighted the overly cosy relationship between financial journalism and PR. 'You can triple your salary by moving from journalism to PR. If you wonder why there is so much hagiography in corporate profiles, it's because a lot of journalists want to get into financial PR in future. Then you have the problem that financial PRs make databases on journalists' tastes. PR corrupts reporters and financial reporters especially.'

There was limited support for statutory regulation of journalists. 'Anything that makes us distinct from the noise in the jungle is good, if that means a code that people that respect then ok but we don't want statutory regulation. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) code was good but it the problem was that it had no sanctions. It was a good mediator and arbitrator but lacked the force,' Rusbridger added.

Hislop felt that there should be more protection for whistleblowers. 'I'd like to see better protection for whistleblowers in the NHS and see more protection of sources.'

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