Are there more consequences for global media baron Rupert Murdoch? Sounds that way. Sales of his other newspapers in Great Britain have notably sagged:
While the final souvenir edition of the News of the World sold 3.8 million copies, the
paper’s stablemates, The Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times, suffered some of their worst circulation figures this year.
According to unofficial estimates The Sun lost as many as quarter of a million readers on Saturday as people registered their distaste with the Murdoch empire over the phone hacking scandal.
The Times on Saturday is thought to have seen the number of readers dip by 30,000, according to unofficial estimates, while The Sunday Times also suffered poor sales as a result of the negative publicity.
Such was the anger over the affair that many disgruntled people set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts calling for a boycott of Murdoch owned newspapers.
And it may not end there.And as the furore over phone hacking and illegal payments to police officers spread to the other titles in the group, questions are being raised over their long term future.
The Sun never recovered from a boycott of sales on Merseyside after it ran a story about the 1986 Hillsborough disaster accusing some Liverpool fans of stealing from victims of the tragedy.
And it may not end there.
A campaign to encourage people to cancel their subscriptions to Sky television in the wake of the phone hacking allegations was launched yesterday on Twitter, the social networking website.
One subscriber said she was told by a member of staff at the broadcaster’s cancellation team: “So you’re seriously going to let your family miss out on quality TV just because of your principles? Good luck trying to watch quality TV without lining Murdoch’s pockets.”
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.