Sunday, July 10, 2011

More on News of the World's End

At New York Times, "At a Paper Set to Close, Defiance and Foreboding":
LONDON — With the tremors of The News of the World scandal still spreading across the landscape of British life, the newspaper’s staff assembled on Saturday for the paper’s last working shift before it is shut down by the Murdoch empire as part of its strategy for limiting the damage to its worldwide brand.

At the newspaper’s plant in Wapping, East London, plans were to double the number of copies printed of the Sunday issue, the paper’s last after 168 years of publication. The run of five million copies was expected to sell out.

The paper’s closing also meant the loss of jobs for 280 reporters, editors and other employees. While some of them had hopes of being rehired for a publication said to be planned by News International, the Murdoch subsidiary in Britain — a new Sunday edition of The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s mass-circulation daily paper — the mood as they prepared to send the final edition to press was one that mixed pride over the paper’s history of revealing some of the most lurid scandals in British life with bitterness at becoming sacrificial lambs.

“We feel like we have paid the price for a small group of people who are no longer at the paper,” Jamie Lyons, the deputy political editor, said in a Twitter post. He said that his colleagues were “appalled and disgusted” by the phone-hacking that brought the paper low, but added a defiant note. “Let’s go out with a bang,” he said.
More at that top link, and at Telegraph UK, "Rebekah Brooks to be questioned by police over phone hacking."

ICYMI: "The End of News of the World."

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