News glut for News of the World saga

Stories in which the media covers the media, generally speaking, often get filed under: "navel gazing"; "inside baseball"; "who cares"--at least as far as mass readerships are concerned.

But that hasn't stopped newspapers from Times Square to Fleet Street from covering the demise of one of their own with the journalistic vigor you'd expect to see in the wake of a world catastrophe.

Or, as the case may be, a News of the World catastrophe. The British tabloid's parent company, News Corp.--via its British publishing arm, News International--made the decision Thursday to pull the plug on the 168-year-old Sunday paper as a result of the phone-hacking saga that's been engulfing it off and on for the past five years. It turns out that the paper sniffed around the voice mailboxes not only of U.K. celebrities, politicians and royals, but also those of a 13-year-old murder victim and various people who died in Britain's notorious 7/7 terror attack. And it scarcely helped matters that this week also saw the revelation that the paper had been bribing London police.

Here in the United States, the shuttering of News of the World, which will go to press for the last time on Sunday, has transcended even the most salacious and highly-trafficked media scandals--say, the bombshell New York Times expose of Tribune Company's sex-crazed corporate governance, or the debate that cropped up over Rolling Stone's career-killing profile of four-star Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The blaring headlines across the pond, meanwhile, seem a fitting send-off for a paper that used many of the same terms to characterize its chosen quarry of "SHOCKERS," "OUTRAGE" and "SHAME."

Indeed: "PAPER THAT DIED OF SHAME" is the phrase that occupies most of the cover of Friday's Daily Mail. The Daily Telegraph took a more poetic tack with, "Goodbye, cruel World," while The Guardian, which reignited the phone-hacking story this week and has covered it perhaps more closely than any other news organization, went the direct route: "The scandal that closed News of the World." All three front pages prominently feature Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive and former News of the World editor-in-chief who has managed to hold on to her job even as 200 News of the World journalists prepare to lose theirs--making her, by all accounts, the newsroom's most-hated woman.

News International's own papers were no less tempered in their treatments. The prestigious Times of London seems none too saddened that its lurid cousin has been "Hacked to death," as it noted in large type below a vintage black-and-white photo of News Corp honcho Rupert Murdoch reading the paper as a much younger man. And News of the World's six-day sister tab, The Sun, which media watchers speculate will launch a Sunday edition to fill the void, delivered the apocalyptic headline, "WORLD'S END."

Murdoch's prized stateside paper, the Wall Street Journal, put the story above the fold even though its patriarch dodged one of its own reporters (plus a correspondent from the News Corp-owned Fox Business Network) Thursday at the annual Sun Valley mogul bonanza. As for Murdoch's beloved New York Post, it may be America's closest approximation to News of the World (supermarket tabloids don't count), but the editors (rightfully) decided that its core five-borough readership would probably be more interested in Casey Anthony's apparent makeover than a foreign paper they may or may not have heard of. (News of the World did get some play in the Post's print edition--albeit buried inside the business section in the form of a nine-graph, 282-word brief.)

Some of the most comprehensive coverage, however, can be found in the pages of the New York Times. News of the World got the most prominent A1 placement of all the headlines in today's edition, which includes six related pieces written and reported by 10 journalists among them. With implications spanning crime, politics, business and perhaps even human rights, this is no doubt a story that has resonated from the trending topics of Twitter to the tops of cable news broadcasts. But one can't help but wonder if the surfeit of coverage in the paper of record might have been the Gray Lady's own way of sticking it to its arch-rival Rupert.

Representatives for the Times declined to comment.