Tattle: Curtains for Murdoch's'News of the World'

BRITAIN'S News of the World, a Tattle favorite due to its lurid tabloid coverage of scandal and violence and home to some of the most detailed accounts of celebrity sexcapades, is closing after more than 100 years.

The last issue is Sunday, and 200 people will lose their jobs.

In a bizarre counter to the current trend, News of the World is not closing because of low sales but because its owner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., has suddenly found a moral compass - one that was located with the help of boycotts, departing advertisers and possible litigation.

News of the World, a tabloid that makes the New York Post seem like the New York Times, and Britain's bestselling Sunday paper at over 2.5 million copies, is being closed by Murdoch's media empire over an alleged phone-hacking scandal.

The paper has long been known for its questionable undercover reporting techniques, especially when it came to politicians, soccer stars and rumored hacking of the cellphones of relatives of terrorist-attack victims and British soldiers killed in combat - but it went too far when it hacked into the cellphone voicemail of a missing teenage girl, possibly even interfering with the police investigation into her murder.

According to the Los Angeles Times (which still, surprisingly, has a reporter in London) James Murdoch, a senior exec at daddy's News Corp., said in a statement that the company accepted responsibility for the distress inflicted by the hacking allegations and the paper's breach of journalistic ethics.

"The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account," the statement said, "but it failed when it came to itself."

The scandal surfaced earlier this week with reports that NotW's freelance private investigator had illegally accessed – and deleted – messages on the phone of the 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped and later found murdered.

Brits are rightly furious.

News Corp.'s British subsidiary, News International, which also owns the Times of London and the Sun tabloid, also has been feeling the heat of NotW's callous behavior due to a boycott organized on Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, the scandal may hinder media-mogul Murdoch's bid to win government approval for a takeover of British satellite broadcaster BSkyB.