Maybe it’s because I’m half a planet away from its production base, but I’m seeing the News of the World in a different way: perhaps as a social agent and moral barometer as well as a commercial product whose internal workings currently vex the UK’s chattering and political classes.

My new perspective was triggered by developments in the paper’s “phonehacking” saga which emerged while  I gave university seminars and a radio interview in Sydney, Australia. (Clarification: I was Chief Production Editor of the NoW, never Editor).

Some personal background: the NoW is my professional alma mater. It is an entity with which I have an emotional connection. It employed me as a 26-year-old journalist in 1977 and brought me to Fleet Street (the real one). One way or another, I remained involved with it for a further 28 years.

I joined it before most working-class families had acquired their perceived current cynicism for popular newspaper journalism.

My father was as a street trader whose only connection with journalism was the three Sunday  newspapers  I would fetch for him as a child: the NoW, People and Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror).

His sensible career advice to me was: “Get a job indoors, son.”

But whenever his South London extended family had a particularly knotty sports argument to settle (and pay out on), say: “What round did Sonny Liston refuse to come out for in his first fight with Cassius Clay?” they’d call the NoW sports desk to adjudicate.

My  point is that what the journalist ruled was taken as true in that Eden-like, pre-Google age. My dad’s folk weren’t stupid, gullible or deferential..they simply felt they had cause to trust the man from the NoW  (and it was always a man).

So when I phoned my dad to tell him I’d clinched my NoW job he was impressed by a career move of mine for the first and last time; if I’d told him I’d got a job on The Times, Telegraph or BBC, he wouldn’t have been.

During the few weeks I’ve been in Australia the NoW has continued to impress; it won a top award for Mazher Mahmood’s brilliant expose of the Pakistan cricket team’s cheats.

Sports betting again and, yes, it was a sting (whisper the word).

The Metropolitan Police also congratulated the NoW for bringing to book some appalling baby traffickers.

And the paper – still Britain’s biggest Sunday seller – also continued its 168-year-old tradition of  less spectacular but socially useful invetigative journalism such as its exposure of a food-date changing scam.

It is true that the paper’s investigations are sometimes, but not always, criticised by my esteemed colleague at City University London, Professor Roy Greenslade.

But the bombshell came in 2007 when my friend and former NoW colleagues, Clive Goodman, was jailed for illegally incercepting phone messages. And now three more NoW journalists have been arrested.

News International published a grovelling apology effectively conceding that Clive was not a “rogue” exception as they had once claimed.

The saga had already led to the departure from Downing Street of the PM’s right-hand communications aide Andy Coulson (a former NoW editor) and now casts a shadow over News International’s CEO Rebekah Brooks (another former NoW editor) as News Corp seeks to recapture the whole of Sky amid a potentially fatal maze of commercial, political and diplomatic mirrors that would have given Bruce Lee a run for his money.

Society does not always condemn illegal practices by journalists; the Telegraph paid for a stolen CD and produced a brilliant series of scoops that altered the structure of MPs’ finances and led to criminal convictions (of MPs not journalists).

Citizens, quite rightly, applauded. Glasses  were raised at Islington dinner tables..and in public bars throughout the land.

It is the outcomes of journalistic “dark arts” that UK society seems to question, not the arts themselves.

“Public  interest” is  apparently what counts with us, not the “interest of the public”.

Thank heavens there are politicians, lawyers, media owners and journalists confident enough to tell one from the other and decide what is in the interest of “ordinary folk” to read or watch.

Alas, I don’t share that moral certainty. And I admit it.

So, the News of the World: a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Saint  or sinner?

One thing’s for sure, if it wasn’t there the British “conversation” would be missing a crucial element.

And, sadly, there are not now many UK national newspapers I could comfortably say that about.