While noting newspapers' increasingly fragile financial health, top reporters and a prominent editor offered ways to do probing investigative journalism whatever the budget.

Their comments came last week as Goldsmith Awards prizewinners and finalists discussed their investigative reporting work. The awards are administered by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul E. Steiger, who received a career award, acknowledged that with newsroom cutbacks, "Many investigative reporters have a sense of desperation. They’re scared the axe will fall. ... The level of intimidation, frustration and anger at Tribune Co. breaks my heart."

Steiger hopes his ProPublica group will take up some of the investigative reporting slack. Funded with $10 million a year for the next three years, the 25-member team plans to produce in-depth articles and programs that papers or networks can arrange to publish or broadcast without charge.

Jo Becker, who with Barton Gellman won the $25,000 prize for their Washington Post series on the Cheney Vice Presidency, used classic reporting techniques on a four-part series showing how a master of bureaucracy gained and wielded unprecedented power.

Becker noted that after their stories were published last June, many complained that they should have run earlier. But she said sources were inclined to talk only after they left the White House staff.

She got them to share information by suggesting she already knew most of what she wanted them to disclose. In this way, she and Gellman got details about -- for example -- how Cheney delved into political minutiae to undercut a law protecting endangered species of fish in Oregon.

One challenge in such a wide-ranging series was what to leave out. "We had to narrow the focus," she said -- omitting, for example, the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby perjury case because that had been well covered. 

Becker and Gellman unearthed records of Cheney advising presidential staffers to, "Be an honest broker. Don’t use the process to impose your policy views." As vice president, Cheney did the opposite.

Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest, one of five Goldsmith Prize finalists culled from more than 100 entries, began their revelations of squalid conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center with a vague tip from a friend of a friend. Priest said the allegation sounded too amazing to be true -- wounded veterans being miserably treated by a government that professed to honor their service.

She said they started investigating by staying "way below the radar," building a small network of soldiers' families, never lying but initially not identifying themselves as reporters as they penetrated the iron gates of the sprawling complex.

"It was basic gumshoe reporting. Hit the streets and hit the phones," she said.

Pointing out that the Walter Reed story was right in their backyard, only four miles away from the Post’s offices, she said "too many reporters worry more about their papers' financial condition instead of doing what they’re hired to do." Smaller outlets can pick up on the Post's findings, she said, by investigating conditions in local Veterans Administration facilities. "You can really make a difference just by asking questions."

Priest said the Post wouldn't ever sacrifice investigative reporting to budget constraints because it’s one of the paper's "franchises" differentiating it from blogs.

Another finalist who uncovered outrageous treatment of wounded soldiers, Joshua Kors, said he stumbled on the story by accident, while interviewing veterans. His two-part freelance series in The Nation, "Thanks for Nothing," revealed some military doctors purposely misdiagnosing soldiers. Attributing injuries to "personality disorders" deprived them of the discharge benefits they'd earned -- saving the government millions.

Wounded Iraqi veterans with personality disorders? It didn’t add up. "When something doesn’t make sense, that’s when you investigate," Kors said.

Noting the press' power, he said that after he wrote about individuals’ plights, "things start to change. Cases get fixed."

Although his investigations sparked four bills in Congress to close loopholes and halt fraudulent discharges, Kors identified a problem many investigative reporters face. After stories run, editors want to move on to the next project, but abuses continue. "These fraudulent discharges are continuing in full force 11 after months after his series ran," he said. "But what do you do?"

What Walt Bogdanich did was remember. The New York Times reporter, along with China-based Jake Hooker, was a finalist for a series disclosing that a Chinese-made ingredient used in antifreeze was killing hundreds. He said he'd been thinking about the topic for 12 years.

Back then, when he was a "60 Minutes" producer, he said he suspected China’s complicity in dangerous drugs. He couldn’t prove it, but “I never forgot it. A low threshold of indignation is an investigative reporting requirement, and mine is lower than most."

So when at The Times he first heard about toxic medicine, he vowed, "This time I'm not going to let them get away with it."

He dug and found the problem, using the paper's computer resources to do database reports. Helped by what he called Hooker's low-key, patient approach to getting dramatic, on-the-record admissions in China, their series helped spark U.S. and Chinese governmental reforms.

Despite newsroom cutbacks, Bogdanich believes investigative reporting "alive and well and more powerful" than ever -- something on which "I'm blessed to be able to spend the New York Times' dwindling dollars."

At first, freelancer Loretta Tofani had zero dollars to spend on her Salt Lake Tribune series showing Chinese factory workers were dying from carcinogens used in making American imports. Her furniture importing business got her access to factories she wouldn’t have been able to visit as a reporter, where she discovered workers using lead based paint with little or no protection. Medical journals confirmed the danger.

Although Tofani had pursued an earlier, 25-year journalism career that included a Pulitzer Prize at the Washington Post, the three papers to which she pitched the story turned her down. Finally, she got a $13,000 grant from Washington D.C.’s Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and $ 4,500 from the Berkeley, CA Center for Investigative Reporting to nearly finish the series, which the Salt Lake Tribune agreed to publish it.

A happy ending, but after "one to two months of terrible anxiety" about whether the four-part investigation would ever run, Tofani said, "I'm not sure I'd do that again."

Another Goldsmith finalist, Palm Beach Post reporter Tom Dubocq, spent two years to unearth a massive public corruption scandal that triggered federal investigations and guilty pleas by four people. The long time Miami Herald reporter marveled at the way computers could winnow public records to spotlight his targets. With an accounting background, he could build financial profiles of his targets ("in my pajamas") and find $10 million discrepancies between official disclosure forms and divorce records.   

Dubocq didn't neglect more traditional methods: confidential sources that steered him to a nine-volume book of records.