News of the World, it sucks to be you

I've been intently interested in the revelations about the inner workings of the News of the World (which thankfully put out it's last-ever copy yesterday). We always knew it was a smarmy operation that favored crappy standards, gossip as news, and carelessly destroying lives. We just didn't know how far it went until all this phone-hacking stuff came out in ever-growing detail.

Even though I used to work in newspaper (or maybe because of that), I have trouble mustering up too much pity for the now-jobless NOTW staff because they say they were not involved in the phone hacking, which supposedly all took place under the previous regime. Even if that's true, they did know they were working for the NOTW, which is smarm-central -- not exactly a bastion of high ethical standards. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, y'all. I understand you gotta make a buck (or a quid as the case may be), but you can't expect everyone to be sympathetic of how you do so.

Let me pull back a bit on that -- I do understand what it's like to really need a job and to work for a newspaper that doesn't seem to care much about people, be they employees or readers. But most of the time that information comes as a surprise, something you don't fully know about until you work for the place in question. And even then, the standards aren't literally criminally low. But NOTW (and in fact many British tabloids) made no secret of having lower standards than a one-eyed drunk at closing time in a backwoods juke joint. So I'm not completely unfeeling toward the staff, but I'm not particularly upset on their behalf, either.

The staff were at least right in being angry Rebekah Brooks didn't go down with the ship -- but she will before long I imagine. I'm just waiting for that shoe to drop.