For my dissertation I've switched focus from the Middle Ages to the 19th century and crime journalism during the golden age of the press. 

Crime reporting in Sweden took off in the first half of the 19th century amidst a boom of newspaper activity. The 1819 case of a sheriff arrested for torturing confessions out of farmhands gave the press a new arena for criticising and understanding societal changes in a country whose governmental censorship failed to silence the investigative press. My thesis proposes to make available a history from below based on how newspapers in Stockholm understood deadly violence, and made and remade the moral and social order in the press.