My startup Scoopinion does try to find the high quality journalism, this is how we do it:
Take a set of sites that
1) Have an editor and or are established blogs.
2) Publish content that you can show to your mother
3)
Then we have a community of readers with "Scrobbling" browser add-on that measures reading speed and read through percentage. Whenever they read, they implicitly rate the article with their behavior. Later the articles are recommended to people who read same sources, topics and journalists.
This has worked pretty well, at least what we hear from our users. If someone has better definitions of quality journalism, would love to hear those.