Profile: It has an infamous obsession with crime and sex, but a run of disasters is costing the News of the World something more precious than its reputation - its readers, writes Roy Greenslade
It has been a bad summer for the News of the World. In June it paid damages to England footballer Ashley Cole for articles that falsely implied he was gay. A couple of weeks later a jury acquitted three men accused of plotting a terrorist conspiracy, rejecting evidence to the contrary given by the paper's infamous "fake sheikh", its investigations editor, Mazher Mahmood. Days after that, another jury awarded £200,000 (€297,000) damages to a Scottish politician, Tommy Sheridan, after deciding that the paper had libelled him by claiming he had consorted with prostitutes. And this week the News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman, was arrested and charged with nine counts of hacking into the royal family's mobile phone messages.
This latest episode could have serious ramifications because the police are continuing their inquiries in the belief that government ministers, celebrities and even other journalists may also have had their calls intercepted by the paper's reporters.
Despite the gravity of the situation, however, it is unlikely that the paper's senior editorial staff are overly alarmed. They are inured to criticism, especially from liberal journalists and the so- called chattering classes.
The News of the World proudly wears the chip on its red-top shoulder, seeing itself as a British working class institution that thumbs its nose at convention by giving the masses what they want: sex, sport, sex, crime, sex, royalty and, you guessed it, more sex.
It is a paper that has always revelled in its own notoriety, embracing controversy and pouring scorn on detractors who point to its many transgressions. Ever since it was founded in 1843 it has pushed at the boundaries of public taste. It published stories no other paper dared to print and, in so doing, built an immense circulation.
Before the second World War it was selling more than 4 million. By 1950, its circulation had risen to 8.4 million, making it the biggest-selling newspaper in the English-speaking world. It had become renowned for its titillating material, mixing high-minded articles by senior political and church figures with pages of court reports about marital infidelities.
The paper's motif, which has endured ever since, was based firmly on hypocrisy: it sold by exploiting a sexual licence it also decried. Look at this degrading filth, it said, isn't it disgraceful? In those more innocent days, the stories were devoid of details, eschewing any description of what happened behind the bedroom door.
One of the typical last sentences was: "Then they went upstairs." There was a running joke that the aristocracy and the upper middle classes were among the most avid of the News of the World's readers, "borrowing" copies from their servants and then concealing their dirty secret by folding copies inside the highbrow Sunday Times.
But the formula became tired and predictable, and it lost sales steadily throughout the 1950s as a bolder rival, the People, set the pace with a flow of agenda-setting investigations. The appointment of a new editor at the end of the decade reversed the trend. The champagne-quaffing, cigar-smoking and rumbustious Stafford Somerfield introduced kiss-and-tell memoirs and a diet of saucy investigations which inevitably concluded with the line: "The reporter made his excuses and left".
Apart from publishing increasingly salacious stories, he was the subject of some pretty ripe stories himself. On a visit to the paper's Manchester office he stayed at a hotel where staff were under instruction not to allow any known prostitutes up to the rooms.
When a porter spotted the editor on his way across the lobby with a girl he recognised he tried to bar the way to the lift, stammering: "I'm sorry Mr Somerfield, but I can't let you take this, er, er, woman, er, your wife, upstairs." Somerfield stared at him for a second, swept past his outstretched arm into the lift, and as he pushed the button shouted to the hapless porter: "How dare you call this trollop my wife!" The paper's staff took their lead from their flamboyant editor, embracing its notoriety. When one of its best-known reporters, Peter Earle, was sent to interview a titled woman about her marital problems, she asked him: "But how do I know you are from the News of the World?" Earle, spreading his arms in mock despair, replied: "Madam, I've already admitted it." Earle played a leading role in the story that helped to turn the paper from being a rather risqué national joke into a less amusing, much darker and infinitely more intrusive publication. The 1963 Profumo affair proved to be a turning point for British popular journalism with papers, led by the News of the World, invading people's privacy with uninhibited abandon.
Somerfield bought up the memoirs of Christine Keeler, the woman who had enjoyed a brief affair with war minister John Profumo, and saw his paper's sales take off. He was in his element and was unworried by official complaints about either the content of his paper nor its foot-in-the-door methods.
HIS REIGN CAME to an end soon after Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1969. He fired him for disobedience and years later remarked: "I sacked the best editor of the News of the World. He was too nasty even for me." The early Murdoch era was also marked by controversy. He published a second instalment of Keeler's memoirs and the paper's main investigative reporters - signed up from the People - wrote a string of sexy exposés. To obtain their stories they started the trend towards bugging, famously hiding a microphone inside a teddy bear in a prostitute's bedroom while concealing a camera behind a two-way mirror to expose a minister's drug-taking.
Despite his forthright defence of the paper, Murdoch never seemed entirely happy with the News of the World. He is far from the stereotype suggested by his "Dirty Digger" nickname and has always found the paper's sordid editorial agenda rather distasteful. He betrayed his ambivalence by changing editors every couple of years and by maintaining its broadsheet shape until reluctantly turning it into a red-top tabloid in 1984. Some editors departed because sales dipped as they tried, at Murdoch's instigation, to clean up the paper. Others went because he couldn't stand the crudeness of their content.
Wendy Henry's editorship in the late 1980s was marked by a series of extremely explicit kiss-and-tell stories that took the circulation to a 13-year high of 5.4 million, but when Murdoch fired her he said: "Sales aren't everything, Wendy".
Since Henry's departure, through five more editors, sales have fallen away year by year, occasionally rising only when a particularly sensational scandal has caught the public imagination. At 3.4 million, it is now at its lowest since the 1930s.
DESPITE MURDOCH'S SUPPOSED fastidiousness, the content has also become increasingly sleazy by providing graphic descriptions of sexual acts. The current editor, Andy Coulson, has tended to rely on an editorial mix heavily skewed towards celebrity and royalty with a judicious helping of crime. He has encouraged the use of increasingly sophisticated technology, such as pinhole cameras and a range of listening devices, and appears happy about his reporters employing subterfuge.
Many of the most controversial scoops have been written by Mahmood, the man who likes to dress up as a sheikh, and his victims have regularly complained about entrapment, including five men who he accused of plotting to kidnap Victoria Beckham.
Last year a Kosovan refugee came forward to claim that he acted as an agent provocateur on behalf of Mahmood to instigate the kidnap plot and several other such stories. He appeared as a defence witness at last month's conspiracy trial that ended with the acquittals of three men accused of attempting to buy red mercury for use in a radioactive bomb, and he is due to give evidence in a libel hearing against the paper.
But Mahmood is not the only reporter to treat the industry's ethical code with contempt. There appears to be a lack of internal discipline as the paper becomes ever more desperate to obtain its stories, as its recent legal reverses imply.
The truth is that the News of the World is now a rogue paper. It has been usurped by a range of even more scandalous glossy magazines - not to mention the daily red-tops - and it cannot find a role. Its only response has been to take greater risks, to become more squalid and to engage in wholly unacceptable journalistic jiggery-pokery. No wonder its audience is deserting it.
The NEWS OF THE WORLD File
What is it? Britain's largest-selling newspaper, selling 3.4m every Sunday (including nearly 151,000 in Ireland)
Why is it in the news? It keeps getting into hot water. Now one of its reporters is facing charges of listening in to the royal family's voicemails
Most appealing characteristic It doesn't give a damn
Least appealing characteristic It doesn't give a damn
Most famous headline (I kid you not) "Nudist Welfare Man's Model Wife Fell For The Chinese Hypnotist From The Co-op Bacon Factory"
Most infamous headline "Dirty Bomb Plot Foiled by News of the World"