Reporters, editors and production staff walked out of the newspaper's headquarters in east London en masse late Saturday. Editor Colin Myler showed the front and back pages of the final edition. He paid tribute to "this wonderful team of people here."
"This is not where we wanted to be or where we deserve to be," he said, before concluding with "and now in the best traditions of Fleet Street, we're going to the pub."
News of the World journalists wrote their own obituary before sending their final edition to the printing presses as Britain's media establishment reels from the expanding phone-hacking scandal that brought down the muckraking tabloid after 168 years.
Buying the News of the World in 1969 gave Australian-born Rupert Murdoch his first foothold in Britain's media. He went on to snap up several other titles, gaining almost unparalleled influence in British politics through the far-reaching power of his papers' headlines.
Now he is facing a maelstrom of criticism and outrage over the sequence of events set off by allegations the paper's journalists paid police for information and hacked into the voicemails of young murder victims and the grieving families of dead soldiers.
The recent revelations culminated in the decision to close the paper and put 200 journalists out of work — but the move failed to stem broader questions about corruption at the newspaper and press regulation in the U.K.
The sordid affair has played out at breakneck pace in the media and prompted soul-searching at the highest levels of officialdom. Prime Minister David Cameron has called for a new press regulation system and pledged a public inquiry into what went wrong; the head of Murdoch's U.K. newspaper operations has alluded that more revelations are yet to come.
1 comment:
What else could one expect from a Murdoch paper?
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