LONDON — To many in Britain, the prosecutors’ decision on Tuesday to lay criminal charges against eight of the most prominent figures in British tabloid journalism over the past decade was a dramatic step toward exacting accountability for the tangled web of wrongdoing in Rupert Murdoch’s London newsrooms.

But with trials pending for those now charged with conspiracy in the phone-hacking scandal — Andy Coulson, Prime Minister David Cameron’s former communications director; Rebekah Brooks, the handpicked boss of Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper empire until she resigned a year ago; five senior editors and reporters at the now-defunct, Murdoch-owned News of the World; and a private investigator — the wider implications are increasingly pressing in.

What is becoming clear, media analysts say, is that the push-the-legal-limits newsroom culture that has gone untrammeled for years at the British tabloids and has even found its way into some of the country’s upmarket broadsheets, including Mr. Murdoch’s Times and Sunday Times, could be a casualty of a new culture of caution.

The indictments did not surprise executives at News Corporation, the New York media conglomerate that owns the British papers, who are readying the split of the company’s newspapers from its more lucrative entertainment assets. The charges, in part, played into the timing of Mr. Murdoch’s finally agreeing to the split, which his top lieutenants had proposed for years, a person familiar with the thinking at the company said.