Author Archives: David King

The News of the World, the largest-selling English language newspaper in the world, is to close its doors after 168 years. Not because of lagging sales, or loss of readers or even the inexorable march of Twitter. The flagship of Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire is being shut down because alleged bad behavior in the news room has made the paper a very big liability in a very high-stakes game of media brinkmanship. In the dog-eat-dog world of tabloid journalism, the ‘big story’ is everything and the NOTW – no stranger to controversy – was the ‘big dog’ when it came to landing those stories. Tabloids have long been attacked for lapses in moral and ethical judgment, but the NOTW raised the bar in 2006 when the paper’s royal correspondent was prosecuted and jailed for hacking the mobile phones of ‘persons of interest’ to the paper. But outrage soon subsided and normal service was resumed.