Concept

News of the World

Summary
The News of the World was a weekly national "red top" tabloid newspaper published every Sunday in the United Kingdom from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the world's highest-selling English-language newspaper, and at closure still had one of the highest English-language circulations. It was originally established as a broadsheet by John Browne Bell, who identified crime, sensation and vice as the themes that would sell most copies. The Bells sold to Henry Lascelles Carr in 1891; in 1969, it was bought from the Carrs by Rupert Murdoch's media firm News Limited. Reorganised into News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation, the newspaper was transformed into a tabloid in 1984 and became the Sunday sister paper of The Sun. The News of the World concentrated in particular on celebrity scoops, gossip and populist news. Its somewhat prurient focus on sex scandals gained it the nickname Screws of the World. In its last decade it had a reputation for exposing celebrities' drug use, sexual peccadilloes, or criminal acts, by using insiders and journalists in disguise to provide video or photographic evidence, and covert phone hacking in ongoing police investigations. Sales averaged 2,812,005 copies per week in October 2010. From 2006, allegations of phone hacking began to engulf the newspaper. These culminated in the revelation on 4 July 2011 that, nearly a decade earlier, a private investigator hired by the newspaper had intercepted the voicemail of missing British teenager Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered. Amid a public backlash and the withdrawal of advertising, News International announced the closure of the newspaper on 7 July 2011. The scandal deepened when the paper was alleged to have hacked into the phones of families of British service personnel killed in action. Senior figures on the newspaper have been held for questioning by police investigating the phone hacking and corruption allegations, alongside former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan.
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