The paywall, set to take effect this summer, will allow each visitor 20 complementary page views per month, excluding the home page and classifieds section. The newspaper hopes to maintain most of its 17 million monthly unique visitors.

Such a metered model has proven successful for other newspapers including The New York Times, which Columbia Journalism Review said generates $100 million through digital subscriptions.

In addition to not counting clicks from search engines and social media, the paywall will allow unlimited access from schools, government and military workplaces, notable as more than 20 percent of District of Columbia residents are federal employees, according to Forbes. But Don Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., has previously noted that locals provide less than 10 percent of the newspaper’s online traffic. This statistic made him previously wary of charging for online access, as he predicted that bundling digital subscriptions with print wouldn’t be as successful for The Post as for other papers.

Eventually all publishers “will have no choice” but to try sponsored content, considering plummeting ad sales, paidContent noted. Newspaper advertising revenues fell over 9 percent in 2011, according to statistics from Newspaper Association of America. And, as Derek Thompson of The Atlantic wrote, “the vast majority of quality journalism has always relied, and probably will always rely, on advertising to be both high-quality and affordable to a massive audience.”

So from that perspective it’s good news that BrandConnect seems to have drawn on the merits and mistakes from other pioneers in advertorials such as BuzzFeed and The Atlantic, and hopefully the new system, too, will provide feedback that will help publishers create their own best practice models.

“Investigative reporting became sexy after Watergate,” wrote Alicia Shepard, media consultant for the News Literacy Project, in The New York Times’ Room for Debate forum on the lasting effects of the scandal, published yesterday.

The tenacious pursuit of a story by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ultimately played an integral part in driving President Richard Nixon out of the White House, and this "sexy" triumph of truth over power, further romanticized in the book and movie that followed (“All the President’s Men”) prompted a “sharp rise in investigative reporting,” wrote Sheperd.

This included the opening of a number of investigative units by newspapers and television stations, and the founding in 1975 – the year after Nixon resigned – of the Investigative Reporters & Editors group (IRE), a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to foster excellence in investigative journalism, which is essential to a free society.”

The Washington Post has started to produce a daily minute-long video compiling latest news headlines, that it posts on its homepage on weekdays at noon. Called '59 Seconds,' the segments include coverage of "politics, policies, sports, personalities in Washington and more," the paper says on its website.

The video show is presented by Ylan Mui, a staff writer at Wash Post who writes about consumers at the economy, and the segment is a mix of Mui speaking directly to the camera from the paper's newsroom, and a mashup of videos and photos. Currently, the videos begin with a 15-second pre-roll ad from Conoco Phillips, the launch sponsor.

"Our goal is to give readers a snapshot of news that reflects Post coverage in a way that's easy to digest and available at the same time everyday," said Andrew Pergam, director of video for The Post. "This is the first of more video products in the pipeline focused on reaching people in ways that are unique to The Post and the region."

The Washington Post already offers a video section of its website featuring the latest videos from WaPo journalists.