On Oct. 14, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet finally gave partisan activist and blogger Magnus Ljungkvist credit for the investigation that ousted a top government official.

Recently, Magnus Ljungkvist (press secretary for Sweden's Social Democrat party and a blogger), revealed  financial mismanagement and tax evasion by Maria Borelius, the Swedish Minister for Foreign Trade. This led to her resignation this week after just six days in office. (Note: Ljungkvist's blog is in Swedish. For background in English, and more links, see Media Culpa.)

Thanks to Sweden's Freedom of Information Act, which allows public access to information such as tax returns of government officials, Ljungkvist discovered that Borelius had hidden the purchase of a house using offshore bank accounts.

This follows a recent scandal in which mainstream journalists exposed the fact that Borelius paid her Flipino cleaner half what she paid her Swedish nanny. In response to her claims that she could not afford more because of heavy taxes in Sweden, Ljungkvist published a table of her tax declarations from 1990 to 1999 along with those of her husband -- demonstrating that she is within the top 20% of income earners in Sweden.

Next, Ljungkvist discovered that Borelius' house in Falsterbo is owned by a company called Blue Moon Investments. However, the documents were signed by Borelius' husband -- who also pays for water, taxes, and garbage collection at the property.

All of Ljungkvist's research was done using public documents. The ensuing mainstream media attention led to her resignation. In the aftermath, the blogger's investigation generally has not been credited by mainstream media. In contrast, Swedish bloggers -- regardless of their political affiliation -- have linked to Ljungkvist's original posts.

From a media perspective, this story highlights several important facets of citizen journalism:

1. Partisanship: Not always bad. Good citizen journalism often relies on some sort of partisanship as a motivator to continue researching a story. (The same thing happened with the Rathergate scandal.) Strangely enough, some of the best citizen journalism is born from a lack of objectivity.
2. Everyone needs access to information. A well-oiled democratic process requires open access to information -- even for people with an axe to grind, whether they are journalists, political activists, or citizens.
3. Journalists aren't always objective. The fact that the mainstream media were not looking where Ljungkvist looked could be a symptom of a lack of personal interest from journalists, or a lack of available resources to investigate. Or it could be related to admissions published in a 2000 book that several journalists were paying their houseworkers under the table. This seems to be a widespread problem in Sweden.
4. Bloggers: Constructive nudging. It sometimes takes a committed blogger to force journalists to address issues they'd rather ignore.
5. Giving credit. Only very recently have some news organization begun giving Ljungkvist credit for his investigation. This reluctance to give credit indicates an unnecessary degree of embarrassment on the part of the traditional media -- perhaps stemming from us-vs-them paranoia perpetuated by both citizen and traditional journalists.

On the whole, this is another great example of how the two forms of journalism can complement each other in terms of their social function. Ljungkvist's contribution is valuable to the processes that the mainstream media concern themselves with -- especially the "public watchdog" role.

(Special thanks to Mark Comerford for bringing this story to my attention and translating the Swedish-language content.)