Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation will close its tabloid News of the World after this Sunday's edition, as a result of an escalating phone hacking scandal, James Murdoch said today.
'Having consulted senior colleagues, I have decided that we must take further decisive action with respect to the paper.
'This Sunday will be the last issue of the News of the World,' he said in a statement.
‘The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account,’ the deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation told staff. ‘But it failed when it came to itself.’
The newspaper will not sell commercial advertising space in Sunday's edition.
Instead the advertising space will be devoted to charities and causes that wish to ‘expose their good works’ to the paper's readers according to James Murdoch.
The paper is also committing to donate any revenue generated from NOTW sales this Sunday to organisations that ‘improve life in Britain’.
The Irish News of the World is said to employ 22 full-time staff and around ten people on a part-time basis.
A series of hacking revelations have hit the tabloid in recent months, with parent companies News International and News Corp coming under increasing pressure as a result.
The main accusations are that journalists, or their hired investigators, took advantage of often limited security on mobile phone voicemail boxes to listen in to messages left for celebrities, politicians or people involved in major stories.
Disclosure that the practice involved victims of crime came when police said a private detective working for the News of the World in 2002 hacked into messages left on the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler while police were still looking for her.
A lawyer for the Dowler family said a number of other papers had also been involved in underhand practices to secure circulation-boosting stories, and said News of the World was 'unlucky' because investigator Glenn Mulcaire had kept copious notes.
In 2007, Mulcaire and the paper's royal correspondent went to jail for hacking.
Police are mining those notes for clues to possible other victims.
The list of those named so far by rival publications also includes victims of the London suicide bombings of 7 July 2005, the parents of missing child Madeleine McCann and families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
