The Press: End of an Era?

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...