The Press: End of an Era?

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Fleet Street buzzed last week with word that a single newspaper had dropped 1,000,000 circulation. The loss left Britain's weekly News of the World with a circulation that still topped 7,000,000—the biggest on earth. But the size and the rate of the drop—faster than that of any other British Sunday paper—prompted one critic, Francis Williams in the weekly New Statesman & Nation, to signal: "It looks as if we are at last drawing towards the close of an era in Sunday journalism—the era of the News of the World."

What has given News of the World a fond place in every second British home is a simple formula: deadpan reporting of crime, from adultery to zooerastry, in almost all the exhaustive (and libel-proof) detail of the court transcript. "We are not a sensational paper," says the paper's creed. " 'Sensation' means making a lot out of nothing. We give facts, simply present all the news." Thus, in columns rife with rape, the paper never descends to such pseudo-glamorous tabloid cliches as "voluptuous" or "comely" to describe a victim; it simply tells the reader in cold detail what happened up to the stage where, as its reports invariably note, offense took place."

Dry Technique. This dry technique of telling a juicy story, marrying the British gift for understatement with the British craving for crimes of excess, was devised by a young barrister named George Riddell, who joined the paper at the turn of the century, when its circulation was 30,000. Riddell soon became managing editor, catered to other favored British tastes by adding big side dishes of sports coverage (including quoits, darts and pigeon racing) and contests, plus a light helping of political comment. "We're just like the Old Testament," Riddell told his critics. "We report crime and punishment." Riddell won a peerage, and his editor, Emsley Carr, was knighted.

The paper also won unusual tribute from a murderer. The day after his arrest in 1935 for killing two women, Dr. Buck Ruxton scribbled a note that he gave to a friend with strict orders to pass it to News of the World only after his death. Ruxton went to the gallows seven months later, protesting his innocence to the last. The next Sunday the paper was able to settle readers' bets as to his guilt by publishing the note—a full confession. Scotland Yard has also had reason to respect the paper's passion for finicky detail. The full published report on the inquest of a bride drowned in her bath produced letters from readers in remote spots who knew of other bathtub drownings of young women linked to the same man, George Joseph Smith. The story helped to hang him.

The Plumber Calls. But the most spectacular tribute came from the growing armies of readers. When the country's newspaper circulations were unfrozen in 1946 for the first time after World War II, News of the World shot up 900,000 in a single week from its 4,000,000 wartime quota. For years, hungry readers queued for it, waited for subscribers to die so they could take the place on the subscription rolls.