W
HEN A NEWSPAPER is written about on a rival’s front page, you can be sure it isn’t good news. So it proved in July 2011, with a flurry of stories about illegal news-gathering techniques at the
News of the World, a tabloid that once boasted of shifting more copies than any other English language newspaper and that, thanks to its principal obsession, was known to reporters as the Screws. Within three days Rupert Murdoch ordered the closure of the paper he had bought in 1969, his first acquisition outside New Zealand and his native Australia. “Thank you,” its final headline blared, “& goodbye”. That, it seemed, was that.