• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 8, 2011

Thursday brought the news that News Corp. will close the 168-year-old News of the World, a British weekend tabloid with total average circulation of 3.7 million, following a final edition to be published this Sunday. The decision followed an outpouring of public anger in the U.K. over unethical and illegal reporting tactics employed by some of the newspaper's reporters, including hacking into the phones of teenage murder victims, the victims of a terrorist attack in London in July 2005, and British troops killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The reasons for the public outcry are plain enough: as a journalist myself, I personally find the phone hacking tactics employed by NOTW reporters utterly repellant. It is disgraceful and it has no place in journalism -- and that was still true, by the way, back when the scandal was confined to supposedly "fair game" like celebrities and members of the royal family (despite the forgiving attitude of the public, which apparently doesn't view those previous victims as human beings because they are famous).

As the scandal erupted, NOTW and its parent company News Corp. took fire from all directions, including all three dominant political parties in Parliament, public prosecutors, other news orgs, and the list goes on. But public opinion was the engine driving all this condemnation, and unsurprisingly, social media played a central role in voicing the grievances of regular Britons.

Pressure was exerted on prominent advertisers to withdraw their advertising from News of the World via campaigns organized on Twitter and Facebook; according to the U.K. and U.S. editions of Wired magazine, Twitter users disseminated pre-formatted tweets, under the hashtag #notw, for other Twitter users to send to big brands demanding they sever relations with the embattled tabloid, made even easier with "easy-tweet buttons." By the evening of July 4, Wired noted that "four out of 10 of the top UK trends on Twitter were News Of The World-related." Similar, pre-formatted protest emails with suggested wordings also circulated online. Meanwhile a watchdog group, Media Standards Trust, set up a Web site at hackinginquiry.org as a hub for activism about the issue on June 15.

The progress of the anti-NOTW campaign was tracked via a number of blogs -- some already existing, some established specifically for the purpose -- which posted updates detailing which advertisers had severed their relationships with NOTW, and which were still undecided... along with information telling visitors how to use online channels to add their voices to the swelling chorus of dissent.