The rise and fall of the bulletin proves in each case one thing:

It is not possible to do anything in terms of quality comparable to the New York Times, which was the goal Bulletin set for itself, for eight million kronor, which was its start-up capital.

The New York Times has an annual budget of around SEK 15 billion.

Dagen Nyheter, to take down the comparison to the duck pond journalism that was so deeply despised in the bulletin rhetoric, costs around SEK 1.5 billion a year to produce.

Not much to learn, one might think.

Bulletin came into the world

in a cloud of system criticism.

You would do something different and better than the existing Swedish journalism.

One would do "evidence-based" journalism, unlike the usual journalism that "drives agendas".

One would carefully distinguish between opinion and facts - or as they said with the journalistic puffiness' strange attraction to English phrases, on "news and views".

The latent criticism in this is that ordinary journalism instead lets opinions guide the presentation of facts.

It is the proud system-critical banner - and reassuring the many prominent journalists they have managed to recruit under it - that has made this small online magazine receive such extensive attention.

So what happens to the critique of the system

, when Sweden's new international-class daily newspaper falls to the ground in a tragicomic chaos?

Is this a clownish sorti even for the suspicion that journalism is partly shaped by the notions that are prevalent in the newsrooms?

I do not think so.

I do not hope so.

I think one should try to distinguish between madness and good intentions in the story of Bulletin.

One of the madness is to benchmark

oneself against the New York Times, and the imagination that qualitative journalism can be produced significantly cheaper if you have the right attitude.

The Uber revolution has also taken place in the media industry - it is the influencer industry, where a single individual's soul life can create an audience as large as a TV channel with all its employees and expensive devices.

News journalism is labor intensive.

One of the good intentions is to practically investigate whether it is possible to build a news journalism that is better at discovering its own unspoken starting points (without just ending up with some other unspoken starting points).

I think it happens all the time, that different notions of society govern the presentation of facts in journalism.

And a critical discussion about this always needs to be conducted.

It is conducted, it is my experience, fairly lively within the editorial offices, but it also needs to be conducted in public.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, it was carried from the left.

Now in the 2020s, it is being carried from the right.

Bulletin was an attempt at radicalization

: they wanted to build a new world outside the old system.

Does that approach belong to the madness or the good intentions?

That's the really interesting question after the Bulletin.