[6] In its last decade it had a reputation for exposing celebrities' drug use, sexual peccadilloes, or criminal acts, by using insiders and journalists in disguise to provide video or photographic evidence, and covert phone hacking in ongoing police investigations.

These culminated in the revelation on 4 July 2011 that, nearly a decade earlier, a private investigator hired by the newspaper had intercepted the voicemail of missing British teenager Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered.

Senior figures on the newspaper have been held for questioning by police investigating the phone hacking and corruption allegations, alongside former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan.

During a visit to London on 17 February 2012, Murdoch announced he was soon to launch a Sunday edition of The Sun, which acted as a replacement to the News of the World.

[12] Priced at three pence (equal to £1.55 in 2023), even before the repeal of the Stamp act (1855) or paper duty (1861), it was the cheapest newspaper of its time[13] and was aimed directly at the newly literate working classes.

Much of the source material came from coverage of vice prosecutions, including lurid transcripts of police descriptions of alleged brothels, streetwalkers, and "immoral" women.

Matthew Engel, in his book Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press (Gollancz, 1996), says that the News of the World of the 1890s was "a very fine paper indeed".

The paper's name was linked with sports events as early as 1903 when the golfing tournament The News of the World Match Play Championship began (now under British PGA auspices).

Maxwell accused Murdoch of employing "the laws of the jungle" to acquire the paper and said he had "made a fair and bona fide offer... which has been frustrated and defeated after three months of [cynical] manoeuvring."

Murdoch came under severe criticism in a television interview with David Frost after the newspaper published extracts, in late summer 1969, from the memoirs of Christine Keeler.

Both newspapers would later endorse Tony Blair's New Labour during the late 1990s and early 2000s before switching back to the Conservatives during David Cameron's leadership.

The award for News Reporter of the Year, went to Mazher Mahmood, the "fake sheikh" who hides his identity, for his exposé of corruption in the cricketing world.

[23] The edition of 10 July 2011 of the News of the World carried its final headline, "Thank You & Goodbye", superimposed on top of a collage of past front pages.

A reporter who contributed to the story spent an evening at the exclusive London club Blaise's, where a member of the Rolling Stones allegedly took several Benzedrine tablets, displayed a piece of hashish and invited his companions back to his flat for a "smoke".

[30] On 10 May 1967, Jagger, Keith Richards, and their friend art dealer Robert Fraser were arrested at Richards' Redlands estate in West Wittering and charged with possession of cannabis and amphetamines, while bandmate Jones' London house was also raided by police and he was arrested and charged with cannabis possession along with his friend Stanislas "Stash" Klossowski, son of French artist Balthus.

[34] The News of the World was rapidly identified by the hippy counterculture as the prime culprit for the imprisonments, which were seen as an attempt by the Establishment to send a collective message to a hedonistic young generation.

Farren later credited his colleague Sue Miles with identifying the paper as a target for protest because, as she put it, "they were the bastards who started this" (with their feature on drugs in music).

[35] Criticism of the sentences also came from the News of the World's future sister publication The Times, which ran an editorial entitled "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?"

in which conservative editor William Rees-Mogg surprised his readers by his unusually critical discourse on the sentencing, pointing out that Jagger had been treated far more harshly for a minor first offense than "any purely anonymous young man".

Commenting on the closure in 2011 of the newspaper against which he had led protests 44 years earlier, Farren was in triumphant mood: The British counterculture and The News Of The World have had an adversarial relationship that goes back for almost half a century.

I recall, way back in 1967, being beaten bloody by police outside the NOTW offices in London's Fleet Street while protesting the newspaper's part in the jailing of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger after the Redlands drug bust.

And then there were the regular stamp-out-these-hippie-dope-fiends "exposés" that fueled the dangerous red-faced ire of all the saloon bar tweed blowhards who "only read the paper for the sports" and not the weekly catalogue of rape cases.

[39]The paper became notorious for chequebook journalism,[40] as it was often discovered attempting to buy stories, typically concerning private affairs and relationships, of people closely involved with figures of public interest such as politicians, celebrities and high-profile criminals.

[43] The paper began a controversial campaign to name and shame alleged paedophiles in July 2000, following the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne in West Sussex.

[49] On 17 January 2011, The Guardian reported that Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator paid by the paper, testified that he had been asked by the newspaper's leadership to hack voicemail accounts on its behalf.

[50] In April 2011, attorneys for the victims alleged that as many as 7,000 people had their phones hacked by the News of the World;[51] it was further revealed that the paper's owner, Rupert Murdoch, had attempted to pressure Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Labour Party MPs to "back away" from investigating the scandal.

[55] On 4 July 2011, it was disclosed that potential evidence had been deleted in spring 2002 from the hacked voicemail account of Milly Dowler, then missing, but later found to have been murdered.

In 2002, Mazher Mahmood, an undercover reporter working for the News of the World, also known as the Fake Sheikh, allegedly exposed a plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham.

Five men were arrested but the trial later collapsed when it emerged News of the World had paid its main witness Florim Gashi £10,000 to work with Mazher Mahmood.