Ha, amazing.
FUCKING HELL. Britain’s biggest selling newspaper has just been closed. Sun on Sunday, I guess?
“The Sun”.
Is there any reason why Sunday newspapers need a different name?
Hell, some things are worth repeating.
[Cynic] How many extra copies will they have to print because of all the extra they’ll sell as it’s the last one?[/cynic]
If there was any genuine decency or contrition there, they’d not print Sunday’s edition.
Fuck me sideways.
Wow!
No there isn’t. I’d just call it The Sun if I was them too.
So, they were going to merge the Sun and NotW newsrooms anyway, and this has just hurried along matters?
Not sure people are going to fall for that to be honest. They would have to leave it 12 months at least to avoid looking like a bunch of cynical bastards. Sorry, I mean, more like a bunch of cynical bastards.
It would be interesting to see how sales of the Sun are doing at the moment
What on earth does Rebekkah know (or I guess how fond of her is Rupert?) that they’ve burned the NotW to protect her?
Agreed. The BBC is discussing it right now. It’d be a very, very difficult launch.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Hope the cretins responsible get serious jail terms.
I guess the nuclear option was pretty much the only one that they had left - about 90 mins ago, The Guardian was reporting that the advertisers who were sticking by the NotW was a shorter list than those who had bailed, most of whom were doing so for the duration of the investigation.
The hope on NI’s part must be that, in doing this, they’ll have cauterised the stump by the time the investigation, in whatever shape, concludes. It will probably work too - unless the Great British Public can hold the knowledge in their heads that NotW was effectively The Sun on Sunday and that News Int has questions to ask as a whole, not just the staff on one paper.
I hope I’m wrong and pressure is kept up on News Int as a whole for a prolonged period.
When (not if) they try to replace it I can imagine there will be a sustained campaign against it.
In other news, Huffington Post UK’s headline: “End of the World” in big red letters. They’ve only been going two days, how will they ever top that?
NI have been lurching from one failed damage limitation exercise to the next for months. How many times have we heard “We are co-operating fully with the investigation”, only for another slew of damning allegations to turn up 5 minutes later.
In this case though, I’m guessing that they realised without advertising, and with decreased circulation, it simply wasn’t viable to run, and Rupert wasn’t keen on running it at a loss for the next couple of years, particularly with the compensation claims he will be facing very soon.
Hopefully, this move will just serve to transfer attention to the Sun.
It’s a pretty drastic step. I can’t help but feel that someone told Murdoch at a meeting that he’d have to get rid of Brooks, and he was willing to do anything other than.
Interesting that this timing also means they’ve hit the day after Private Eye comes out. I could certainly see Murdoch not wanting to hand them an issue on a platter.
Haha, awesome. Apparently now all the soon-to-be-ex NotW employees are preparing to dish all the dirt they’ve got. Possibly it’s just a “Hey, give me a new job!” bluff, but I suspect (and hope) there are some frantic phone calls going on right now.
PE usually goes to press on the Monday before it gets sent out. I’m sure that the Murdoch archives, hidden deep in the vaults, are being broken out as we speak.
There might be a problem using the name “Sun” for a Sunday paper as there’s already a paper published in the north-east called the “Sunday Sun”.