Roland Watson, Sean O’Neill Eva Simpson

The phone-hacking scandal felled the best-read newspaper in the English language yesterday when James Murdoch announced that this Sunday’s edition of the News of the World would be the last.
One hundred and sixty-eight years after it rolled off the presses for the first time, the paper is to close after being engulfed in claims of illegal, corrupt and immoral practices that have continued to snowball.
Sunday’s final edition will carry no commercial advertising after the trickle of companies boycotting its pages became a flood.
News of the World staff, gathered without warning in the paper’s newsroom in warning, East London, listened in stunned silence as Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News Inter national, delivered the news. About 200 are expected
to lose their jobs.
Colin Myler, the paper’s Editor, told the meeting after she had left that Ms Brooks had twice offered her resignation the previous night. “We’ll accept it,” said
Convicted in the court of public opinion
William Rees-Mogg; Opinion, page 29

What journalists do — and what readers expect

Letters, page 31

Max 20C, min 8C Friday July 8 2011 thetimes.co.uk I No 70306 £1

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THE TIMES ARCHIVE

Rupert Murdoch casts a proprietorial eye over his new purchase in 1969 after fighting off a £34 million rival bid from Robert Maxwell to buy the News of the World. It remained a broadsheet until 1984

Hacked to death
After 168 years, News of the World is shut down as scandal claims its biggest scalp
one member of staff, as others cheered.
The decision to close the Sunday tabloid
sent shockwaves through Fleet Street and
Westminster, but MPs said that it would
not end the hacking saga.
Today, Andy Coulson, the Prime
Minister’s former communications chief
and former News of the World Editor, is
expected to be arrested. Sources said that
detectives had evidence that allegedly
implicated him in phone hacking and illicit
payments to police officers.
Earlier yesterday, the Government
signalled that the multibillion-pound
takeover of BSkyB by News Corporation
would be delayed because of an avalanche
of public protest.
Mr Murdoch, deputy chief operating
officer and chairman and chief executive
of News Corp’s International division,
issued a written statement to all staff at
News International, which publishes The
Times and is a subsidiary of NewsCorp.
He said that he and other executives had
made a series of wrong and misleading
statements about the extent of phone
hacking at the paper.
It was wrong to state, after the jailing in
2006 of the paper’s former royal
editor Clive Goodman and Glenn Mul-
caire, a private investigator, that hacking
was the work of a rogue reporter. The
paper had also misled Parliament, offering
statements “without being in the full
possession of the facts”.
Mr Murdoch added: “The company paid
out-of-court settlements approved by me. I
now know that I did not have a complete
picture when I did so. This was wrong and
is a matter of serious regret.” A fine
newspaper had been sullied by behaviour
that was wrong, he said. “ Indeed, if recent
allegations are true, it was inhuman and
has no place in our company.”
But management was also to blame for
the paper's demise. After the jailing of Mr
Goodman and Mr Mulcaire, News of the
World and News International executives
“failed to get to the bottom of repeated
wrongdoing that occurred without
conscience or legitimate purpose”. Mr
Murdoch added: “Wrongdoers turned a
good newsroom bad and this was not fully
understood.”
But he insisted that Ms Brooks would
be staying in her job, despite calls for her
to resign. “I am satisfied that Rebekah, her
leadership of this
Popular journalism is
crucial to a free society
Leading article, page 2
Staff wept as they were
told the news
News, pages 3-10
business and her standard of ethics and her
standard of conduct throughout her career,
are very good,” he said in a subsequent
television interview.
Yesterday’s anouncement marked a
momentous decision for the Murdoch
family. The News of the World was the
first Fleet Street title acquired by Mr
Murdoch’s father, Rupert Murdoch, when
he fought off the rival claim of the late
Robert Maxwell in 1969.
It capped four extraordinary days in
which the phone-hacking saga was
transformed from a story in which the
victims were celebrities and politicians to
claims involving murder victims and
bereaved families.
News International found itself
firefighting claims that the family of the
murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler was
given hope that she might be alive because
messages were being deleted from her
mobile phone’s voicemail inbox on behalf
of the News of the World; that the families
of the victims of the Soham murders and
7/7 terror attacks had been hacked; and
that bereaved Service families who had
lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan
were also victims.