The recent Washington Post debacle of attempting to sell access to political elites via "salons" at the home of the paper's publisher offers a startling glimpse at how low commercial media have stooped. Yet we shouldn't be surprised. This is what happens when commercial news organisations are desperate for increasingly elusive profits. Such machinations will likely only get worse.

As newspaper revenue and circulation plummets, the commercial press grasps for creative new ways to turn a buck. Many papers have begun running ads on their front pages – a space once deemed off-limits – most egregiously exemplified by the Los Angeles Times running one indistinguishable from a news story. Other papers are laying off reporters and editors, dismantling foreign and statehouse bureaus or literally shrinking the size of their publications to stay afloat. And others have simply closed the doors forever.

How bad do things have to get before we recognise the need for a structural overhaul of our media system?

As they scramble to meet Wall Street's demands and pay down debts accrued from earlier consolidation sprees, many news organisations are in denial about two unsettling facts. First, advertising-supported journalism is dead. Though structurally flawed from its origins – and historically biased toward powerful interests – this model functioned for 150 years. Its reign is over.

Second, there is no new commercial model that will replace what's being lost anytime soon. Even as newspaper companies beg Congress for antitrust exemptions, collude in secret to set up online pay walls and crack down on copyright violations, nothing comes close to replacing the print advertising revenues being lost.

Many media companies are trapped in old ways of thinking. They see news as merely a commodity. They refuse to acknowledge that the news business is no longer as profitable as it once was, nor will it likely ever be so again. But many papers can remain sustainable if they are managed properly and driven less by profit imperatives than a commitment to public service.

Toward those ends, Free Press recently published a report (pdf) that offers a two-pronged approach to removing or minimising commercial pressures on news-gathering.

On one track, we propose changing tax laws to make it easier for news organisations to become low- or non-profit entities, controlled by the communities they serve. For example, low-profit limited liability companies would help remove market pressures from news operations and mandate public service.

On the other, we need to better fund and expand public media and R&D efforts toward long-term solutions. The government has a role to play in providing resources that promote new media experiments and innovation.

We need to create a permanent place in society for a multimedia, nationwide press system that is shielded from market fluctuations. In addition to local and investigative news, these civic media would include cultural and educational content and be conferred the same special status as public museums, parks, libraries and schools – all necessary institutions for a healthy democratic society.

Indeed, some media owners concede that the market has already stripped profit from their news organisations and they are simply looking for a way out. We can help facilitate this changing of the guard through managed divestiture and prepackaged bankruptcies, thereby returning newsgathering to local communities and journalists themselves.

The bottom line is that newspapers are in crisis because of their flawed business model. Our task is to take advantage of this historic moment to remove the profit motive in newsgathering. By emphasising how the current structures are broken, we can hold the line on our existing media system's decline while at the same time advocating for entirely new models. Drawing the wrong lessons from our current crisis leads to embracing the wrong alternatives, like allowing more media concentration.

To be sure, some for-profit models continue to function, and new ones may emerge. What's more, many struggling news organisations would still make a profit if it were not for their parent companies' crushing debts, and perhaps they could continue to do so for years to come if shielded from increased market pressures.

But the purely commercial model no longer works. Yet like some beast that has not yet realised it's received a mortal blow, commercial media will seemingly go to any length – even selling their journalistic integrity – to prop up this failed model.

As it becomes abundantly clear that a corporate media system cannot withstand market pressures long enough to deliver the news our democracy requires, it's time to make an orderly transition to a public service model. The first step in this conversion is for government to implement sound public policies that restructure media along more democratic lines.

If we don't start rethinking the entire media system, and building the political will to change it, newspapers selling access for money may be the least of our worries.