consequences

It has never happened before that my concerns were answered that quickly and that decisively. On Wednesday night I wrote concerning the phone hacking scandal that has embroiled the British media that "the true scandal is that the News of the World is still in business". Less than 24 hours, action had been taken and the News's demise had been announced. The last issue came out this morning. Tomorrow, 200 journalists, editors and assorted staff are looking for a new job.

On the one hand, I'm happy with the outcome, happy that the only possible course of action has been taken. No matter what the current staff claim, the News was not a good newspaper in the classical sense. Its contributions to the exposure of economic and political misbehavior of national significance and the checking and balancing of government were minimal.

On the other hand, people will suffer that had nothing to do with the phone hacking scandal. When that was initially revealed, many on the News's payroll were replaced and the paper got a new editor-in-chief. It also got a new face, claim its supporters, and had nothing to do with the lurid tabloid of yore, but its scoops that went national tell a different story.

Most notably, there were the sex parties of Max Mosely, then the boss of FIA, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. Hookers engaged in bondage and S&M were first spread out in the privacy of his basement bedroom and then on the front page of the News of the World. News? Who cares? Which healthy, sane person anyway?

The present News of the World was by no stretch of the imagination a paragon of journalistic integrity and moral virtue. But it might have just been a collateral victim of the crisis it caused. It is worth noting that more than two-and-a-half million people bought the paper up until last week, unfazed by scandal, and many will do so today in the hope of getting a piece of history.

The News didn't close because it failed commercially. It was closed down by its proprietor, News International, in a highly cynical move calculated to have no negative consequences. The main reason is the attempt to save the long-planned and highly contentious bid for the broadcaster BSkyB. No matter that the News of the World was the most profitable paper in News International's UK portfolio, TV is apparently where the real money is. (And here I was thinking that the internet age had started and group viewing was out.) But with every new revelation regarding the News's phone hacking, public opinion and increasingly politicians turned against News International and the proposed takeover looked ever more likely to be blocked at the last minute. The News was sacrificed for damage control. It had become a liability to the larger business strategy but also threatened to taint its sister papers, most notably The Times. The gap left by in the publishing landscape will in time be filled by another, very similar title from the same company, probably by expanding The Sun to a seven-day schedule. The direct financial loss for News International will probably be small.

The loss for the employees that lost their job will be bigger, at least until they are absorbed in the Sun on Sunday. But I'm wondering, if you're creating not only a successful newspaper but one whose readership is higher than any other papers' in the UK, and you lose the support of your owner, why don't you just continue anyway? Find cheap office space somewhere in an unfashionable part of London, buy a few computers, call the advertisers that used to love you and get them to recommit, and put together the first issue of The New News. Then email it to a press, distribute the product and see what happens.

That's how capitalism should work, anyway. Selling a product that people want to buy should be good business. But something's wrong with capitalism. When a profitable newspapers goes under but failed businesses like banks, airlines and car manufacturers are kept alive by generous government handouts, something's seriously wrong. Capitalism is broken. There's a lot to say about this, more than fits into this post. And it will take more than 24 hours to say it, and especially to fix.