Introduction

Abstract

The lamentable closure of the NOTW in 2011 and the public attention it attracted provoked this book. Its germ was a small-scale study day, set up to investigate this title — suddenly history — in its existence across three centuries, from 1843 to 2011. In the summer of 2011, News International (part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp) made the decision to close the paper, in the midst of a deepening scandal that purported to implicate the paper in ‘phone hacking’, that is, accessing messages on private mobile phones in order to gather information about celebrities, royalty and the general public. Such allegations had been made since 2006, but they came to a head in 2011, with suggestions that the phone of Milly Dowler, a murdered British schoolgirl, had been hacked after her death, a gross personal violation that led to a serious backlash from the public and from advertisers. The phone hacking scandal led to the Establishment of the Leveson Inquiry — a public inquiry set up to investigate the practices and ethics of the British press, including the NOTW but extending well it beyond. ¹ This was not an august end for a paper that had been, as this volume demonstrates, central to the cultural life of Britain at various points, and among the world’s highest selling newspapers.