The Guardian rounds up the best comments, questions and answers from our recent live chat on tomorrow's journalist – what tools and skills will they need to survive and thrive?
As many of you know, I dream of editing in tabloids, so I couldn't let the phone-hacking scandal at my beloved News International go uncommented. Currently doing work experience at The Sun, I'm smack-bang in the middle of it all, and I have written about it on my blog Scandilous Life on The Medwire.
"As a journalism student infatuated with tabloids and as an admirer of Rebekah Brooks I will no longer hold my peace. The phone-hacking crisis is devastating for News of the World and News International, and if all the accusations are true it is absolutely disgusting. Sienna Miller and various slebs, reality TV stars and footballers I could live with, laugh at and defend. Murdered schoolgirls, war widows and 7/7 victims I cannot. However, this is an opportunity to clean up our acts and not a day of doom for a major part of commercial journalism..." To read on, click here: http://www.themedwire.co.uk/2481/on-hacking-defending-tabloids-and-the-future-of-them/
I guess it hinges on the whole public persona/right to privacy thing. I couldn't 'live with' any of it, but before I was just cynically unsurprised. Now I'm just a bit shocked that it's gone on so long - the attempt to kick it into the long grass, I mean. Of course the invasion of privacy is horrible - but worse is the fact that one man and his corporation (that could be a variety act...) seem to be quite capable of obfuscating the ordinary mechanisms of justice in this country. I'm thinking internal investigations into the scandal, police inquiries, public pressure - all thwarted for many months till this happened. But then, I suppose that man is Rupert Murdoch, 'most powerful man in the world' or whatever.
There's a campaign to get a public inquiry and a referal of the BSkyB takeover bid to the Competition Commission. It's had more than 150,000 responses so far (including mine).