HALIFAX — A journalist who was once a confidential informant for the RCMP says she'll never speak with police again.

And she's advising young journalists to do the same.

"Never talk to the police," Stevie Cameron told a symposium on democracy and journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax on Saturday.

"My encounter with the RCMP has been a disaster for me and I will never talk to the police again, and I think that would be good advice for you."

Cameron is the journalist listed as a police informant in the ill-fated Airbus investigation which eventually led to a lawsuit by former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

She initially denied the allegations when transcripts pointing to her informant status were made public in November.

However, last month Cameron admitted she had given Mounties what she considered to be public information, but said she had never consented to the confidential informant status.

The author and freelance journalist said she's already been avoiding contact with police.

Cameron has been writing a book about British Columbia's alleged serial killer, Robert William Pickton, for the last two years and hasn't spoken to police once, she said.

Alongside Cameron on the panel were two journalists all too familiar with the fight for freedom of the press.

One was Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, whose home and office were raided by RCMP officers in January as they searched for the source of leaked police documents.

Also on the panel was Andrew McIntosh, who won a court battle to protect the confidentiality of sources in the Shawinigate affair in January.

Cameron said the controversy surrounding her relationship with the RCMP has changed investigative work in Canada forever.

"Reporters are now telling me that stories they did where they traded any information with the police, those stories will probably never appear now. One person did six months of work on a story that has been killed."

Cameron, who said she has paid $50,000 in legal costs since November, told the standing-room only audience that journalists, especially freelancers, are shying away from investigative reporting because of the financial and professional risks involved in disclosure.

King's journalism student Roberto Rocha, 24, said he isn't letting horror stories from the trio of veteran journalists scare him off digging for a story.

"The final idea that I got from this is, `Deal with police as little as possible, or not at all.' That is not something that I want to take out of this or advice that I will take to heart."

Dealing with police is a reality of reporting, said Rocha, but the bigger question is where to draw the line between working with and collaborating with police.

Dean Jobb, professor of journalism and media law at the university, said his advice to students on dealing with police is clear.

"Be very aware of police motives if they agree to sit down with you. I think they're very happy to get information from you. I don't think they're very happy to give you information."

It's not the death of investigative reporting, said Jobb, but the fallout from Cameron's experience has made using police sources a less appealing option for many journalists.

Many of his students were unclear where to draw the line between their civic duty to police and their journalistic responsibility to sources.

That line, Jobb said, has become more clear in light of cases like that of Cameron.

"If there was any naivete up to this fall, I think it should be gone now. What journalists have to do is govern themselves on the assumption that anything they say to police not only can be publicly revealed down the road, but probably will be."