Loong Online News & Events & Guides

So there it is, the best-selling English-language newspaper in history has shut down in the face of phone-hacking allegations that have proven beyond the pale – even for readers whose regular news diet includes such gems as “My big fat gypsy divorce at 19″. But above the din of indignation overflowing from the opinion, commentary, and editorial columns, there is, I think, a bigger picture point. The closure of the News of the World marks a turning point in the development of news in the digital age. A watershed moment perhaps.

Just to get it out of the way, let me say that in my own view, News Corp’s handling of the scandal surrounding former employees’ phone hacking activities was pretty awful. Rather than shutting down the people responsible for sullying the title, they shut down the title responsible for sullying the people least implicated in the scandal – journalists working at the paper who had nothing to do with the phone hacking scandals(Loong Gold). Clearly Rebekah Brooks should have resigned immediately; regardless of how much she knew at the time that she was editor of the News of the World, egregious corrupt behaviour occurred on her watch and the honourable thing to do would have been to resign. Rumours of Brooks having tendered her resignation and it not having been accepted are nonsense: If you want to resign, and you know it’s the right thing to do, you just walk out the door. Moreover, for all the sensationalism surrounding the decision to close the paper, it wasn’t such a magnanimous move given that the advertisers sustaining the paper were fleeing in droves anyway, and the title’s reputation and credibility had been all but wiped out(Loong Online Gold).

To the bigger picture then, and why I think the end of News of the World neatly ushers in the burgeoning of online news. The “future of news” debate has been happily whirring away in circles for the past few years with nothing much changing – will print survive, will it not; will journalists be superseded by citizens, will they not; will advertisers still pay to reach audiences online, will they not? The closure of News of the World (and perhaps even some of the other News Corp publications if further scandals are uncovered), feels like a symbolic changing of the Guard, and hopefully a step closer to some real world answers in the hitherto academic future-of-news debate. News Corp represents all that was – monopolistic print and television news, cozy relations with politicians, and talk down journalism – and as it crumbles, the inevitable questions of what will replace Cheap Loong Gold arises.