Headlines, deadlines and a news story that isn’t over yet

It didn’t go so far as to bid the paper Rest in Peace, but there was no getting away from it, all 116 pages, including a 48-page souvenir pullout, were a lengthy obituary to a publication that until this week many thought untouchable.

Like all good obituaries, it gave only a cursory mention to its failings. Instead, the inside editorial was a blatant pitch for the paper’s inclusion alongside buttered crumpets in a list of British institutions. It talked at length of its achievements and the part it had played recording moments of history from the sinking of the Titanic to the first man on the moon. It praised its own campaigns from the battle for Sarah’s Law to its Christmas appeal which delivered toys to the children of every serviceman and woman in Afghanistan and its fight for compensation of the July 7 bombings. Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl whose phone was hacked as she lay dead, wasn’t mentioned by name, neither were the families of the British soldiers killed in action whose grief we now know had secretly been intruded upon.

It didn’t need to. Those revelations, along no doubt with fresh allegations about the paper’s relationship with police officers, will be raked over in the weeks and months to come.

However, in the page three apology, it did admit: “We praised high standards, we demanded high standards but, as we are now only too painfully aware, for a period of a few years up to 2006 some who worked for us, or in our name, fell shamefully short of those standards. Quite simply, we lost our way.”

There are few who believe the closure of a paper, which pushed itself on to news stands on October 1, 1843, was done out of any moral impetus, but as the world awaits the next move from News International proprietor Rupert Murdoch, it was left to some of the paper’s longest-serving staff to write the News of the World’s final chapter, much of it with typical brashness.

Mazher Mahmood, investigations editor and everyone’s favourite Fake Sheik, compiled his top 12 list of exposés, from the GP who had hired him as a hitman to kill his wife to the TV actor caught supplying cocaine and cannabis. Columnist Carole Malone delivered a page long love letter to the NOTW, speaking no doubt for all those who feel they have been made to carry the can while Rebekah Brooks, the former editor in charge during the period of some of the worst allegations, remains, at least for now, safe in the ivory towers of News International.

Malone was sentimental, gushing about the paper’s achievements, but on behalf of those responsible for some of tabloid journalism’s darkest days, she also said sorry, a word that has recently been in scant supply.

Elsewhere, it was business as usual, from some new sultry photograph of Florence Brudenell-Bruce, the lingerie model said to be dating Prince Harry, an inside glimpse into Katy Perry and Russell Brand’s new £4m Hollywood home and breaking news about Coronation Street’s viewing figures. They’re bad apparently and could get worse.

Not perhaps, the kind of shock and awe stories that the NOTW would have liked to wanted to bow out with, so it was left to the souvenir supplement to remind readers of its finest hours.

This was, after all, the paper which in 1963 ran the confessions of Christine Keeler which sparked the Profumo Affair, the paper which in 1986 exposed Jeffrey Archer, then deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, and his relationship with prostitute Monica Coghlan and which more recently laid bare allegations of match-fixing in cricket.

However, it was the private lives of celebrities which were the NOTW’s stock-in-trade and yesterday John Leslie, Hugh Grant and Ryan Giggs all saw their own humiliating front pages re-published for one final time.

Given the paper’s obsession with gossip of the rich and famous, it was perhaps fitting that the pages by showbiz columnist Dan Wooton said most about the possible reincarnation of the NOTW brand. Under the heading, “Got a story about a star?”, his email remained at the top of the page and after a special mention for his favourite celebrities (Cheryl Cole, Lady Gaga and Louis Walsh), he told readers, “Your support this week has meant the world. I will be back soon”.

While the final ever edition of the NOTW may have signed off with the front page headline, “Thank you and goodbye”, it has left a lucrative gap in the market and one Murdoch will be determined to fill. Whether that is in a matter of days, weeks or months is not known, but for now there is a space on the news stands which had remained occupied until yesterday for more than a century-and-a-half.

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