Screwing the poor bloody infantry

‘Hacked to death’ was one newspaper headline, as the nation digested the closure of the News of the World.

 Surely only moral caution prevented a sub-editor somewhere offering up the one-word headline ‘Screwed’, probably in 140pt Helvetica bold with three exclamation marks.

 The newspaper known to generations of journalists, with considerable affection, as ‘The News of the Screws’ for its’ propensity to expose the dubious love lives of the famous, is no more.

 As the phone-hacking scandal became increasingly toxic for News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch, the ruthless and, yes, surprising decision was taken to kill it. I can’t have been the only journalist to have sworn aloud when I first heard the news.

 I will be astonished if The Sun on Sunday doesn’t rise from the ashes within the month, with considerably fewer journalists and an editorial budget of peanuts, just to give News Corp a presence in the Sunday tabloid market.

 Anyone with cursory knowledge of the way newspapers are going can guess this from the fact that News Corp were already planning seven-day working, with production journalists assigned across more than one title.

 Having seen this happen at close quarters, I know that it’s a recipe for two things; declining editorial quality as journalists are forced to work for a paper with which they have absolutely no affinity, as well as massive cost cuts.

 In my case, it saw entire layers of the process cut away in the name of efficiency. What was left was a group of good young reporters rewriting the same copy for different newspapers to save time, while production journalists were denied the chance to use any of the flair they had built up over the years because they had to work to pre-set templates.

 In this case, the savings will surely be used to shore up BSkyB, especially if News Corp is given the all-clear to buy the whole of the company which it now sees as its’ cash cow for years to come.

 But let’s not talk about the higher business and politics issues here; let’s talk about the ordinary reporters and sub-editors, (the latter, especially, some of the best in the business), who will lose their jobs as a result.

 Almost none of them worked for the NotW when the worst of the excesses were taking place. I’ve seen estimates that less than one in four will be offered jobs elsewhere within the company.

 Meanwhile, News Corp has reportedly offered the equivalent of 90 days’ salary to those pushed out, thus ruthlessly sidestepping the need for a 90-day consultation period with staff and unions when redundancies are made.

 No wonder Sun sub-editors are said to have walked out in protest when the news was announced.

 So, through no fault of their own, those journalists will now have to join the hordes of their fellows pushed out on to the jobs market by the big national and regional media companies in the last three or four years. 

 Good luck with that, then.

 As everyone from Hugh Grant upwards pontificates about the need for greater press regulation and, at the time of writing, News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks keeps her job, has anyone thought about the people who had nothing to do with this scandal (yes, it was a scandal of shattering proportions) but who are today facing the consequences?