read more at NiemanJournalismLab, Harvard

actually, he calls it accountability journalism...

Some key thoughts

The underlying principles of the newspaper of the 1900s are skewed in three ways, making it possible to sustain a business model for journalism.

• the advertisers were overpaying
• the advertisers were underserved (seems tautological, but he means that journalism were independent of "commercialism" since advertisers could not influence by exit - "fine leave, but where else are you going to go, we are the newspaper of this region"...)
• newspapers were a bundled product practically cross-subsidizing journalism....

Newspapers have been a commercial product that has delivered public utility by keeping the governent accountable.
There is no one new model to replace the newspapers (today providing 85% of accountability journalism), the demise of traditional media will entail a loss of accountability journalism and therefore public utility.

There are alternatives like social production of accountability journalism (wikileaks, opengov etc.) and sponsored/non-profit production (the New Yorker, Public Service Media etc.). The former is greatly benefiting of the internet, but the latter will also be needed to fill the gap. While the old paradigm of newspapers is tumbling down, new sources of accountability journalism are growing, but not fast enough.

The error of the newspaper model is not the model itself, but the fact that this one model have constituted 85% of important scrutiny and reporting...

I guess the heavy reliance on Public Service Media in Sweden can prove to be a good thing after all....