The New York Times' Walt Bogdanich told a ballroom full of reporters at IRE's Miami conference this morning how he finds his great investigative stories: "In the newspaper."

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The key, he said, is reading the paper differently than the casual morning reader -- reading stories with an eye for what is left unsaid. It's part of a contrarian attitude that he believes is essential to finding great stories.

Case in point: Bogdanich's Pulitzer Prize-winning work on how toxins from China have made it onto the global market. The spark for the story was an article he read about a rash of deaths in Panama from cold medicine. The conventional wisdom, Bogdanich said, was that poison "accidentally" made it into the medicine. He didn't understand how something like that could be an accident.

"What I do is the opposite of conventional wisdom. You can't think the way everyone else thinks," he said.

So he pitched the story (although at that point he knew of no American connection) and eventually learned that it wasn't an accident -- it was an industry. "It was the chemical industry, which had no business selling pharmaceutical ingredients, selling out the back door, unregulated."

Bogdanich's tips were aimed at business journalists (the seminar was sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism) but can be applied to any beat.

Selling the story

The hardest part of Bogdanich's story, he said, isn't the investigations, but getting editors to give him the green light.

"If you don't get on the dance floor, there is no dance," he said. "It is a planned sales job. It's not something you do on the way to the men's room or the cafeteria ... It's an appointment."

He advised making that appointment after you have already done some digging into the story. Bring some documents to bolster your argument. Don't ask for a year -- it's better to say the story will take a couple weeks and keep going that way as long as you can.

And that appointment is best made, he added, after you have already reported the stories suggested by the editors.

Don't waste time

Avoid those stories that turn out to be black holes -- the ones that take all your time and go nowhere. That's what editors fear when they consider cutting you loose to work on something for months.

He suggested thinking of potential stories in "minimum/maximum" terms. If everything works out perfectly, what's the greatest story you could have? And if you get nothing, what's the worst story? Make sure the worst-case scenario story is still worthwhile.

For the cold medicine deaths story, the worst he was going to get was a story simply questioning why people in Panama were dying from cold medicine. And the best, well, that's pretty much what he got.