Countries around the globe that are enjoying greater press freedoms and growing democracy are also seeing more unsolved murders of journalists and imprisonment of reporters for political reasons, the director of Columbia University's Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism told a Freedom of Information Day gathering yesterday.

The press "has never been freer," Sheila Coronel, a leader in investigative journalism in the Philippines and Asia, told a group gathered at the East-West Center. " ... Journalists are having a heyday."

Coronel listed investigative journalism success stories all over the planet that have toppled political leaders — along with increased television viewership and newspaper readership in Asian countries.

But dozens of journalists are being killed and jailed each year even when they're not covering war zones, Coronel said.

Only 17.5 percent of the journalists killed last year, for instance, died "in the cross-fire."

She suggested the numbers of killed journalists have risen as oppressive regimes have given way to greater press scrutiny.

"Where the media is controlled, you don't need to kill journalists," Coronel said.

But in democratic or "semi-democratic societies," she said, "journalists become a danger to the powerful."

The overwhelming number of journalist murders remain unsolved, she said.

With increasing costs and declining ad revenue in Western newspapers, it's increasingly difficult to see sound investigative journalism, Coronel said.

At the same time that investigative journalists are being pressured by courts and governments to reveal their sources, newspaper budgets for investigative journalism are often the first to be cut, in favor of entertainment and sports coverage, Coronel said.

"It's not a good time to be a newspaper journalist in the U.S.," she said.

And Western television networks are replacing sound investigative journalism with "increasingly shallower stuff," she said.

But there are many bright spots — such as the growing number of nonprofit organizations around the world that are supporting investigative journalism, and the growth of non-traditional technologies that are encouraging "citizens who are filling the gap in watchdog reporting."

And in many developing countries, especially in Asia, newspaper readership continues to grow, Coronel said, and newspapers are "still playing that crusading role."

Coronel will speak today from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in the University of Hawai'i's Korean Studies Auditorium.

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.