Hoje comprei o News of the World pela primeira vez - e última

The final edition is downright odd. If I were editor, I'd have scrawled nobs all over the front and plastered a cut-out-and-keep effigy of Brooks across the centre pages. Instead, the front page mumbles THANK YOU AND GOODBYE over a collage of previous headlines.

Inside is an account of the paper's history so rose-tinted you can smell the petals, focusing on its scoops and ignoring ghastly low points like the 1988 story about the actor David Scarboro (who played EastEnders' Mark Fowler before Todd Carty), in which it printed images of the psychiatric unit where he was receiving treatment. He later killed himself.

In 2009 a NoW editorial attacked this paper's phone-hacking coverage as "inaccurate, selective and purposely misleading". "NO INQUIRIES, NO CHARGES, NO EVIDENCE" it thundered. "Like the rest of the media, we have made mistakes . . . When we have done so, we have admitted to them."

Yet today, apart from a brief mention about the paper "losing its way" on page three, the closest the final edition gets to addressing the scale of the scandal comes in Carole Malone's column: a page that has previously functioned as a rectangular bin full of tutting, spite and rabble-rousing lies about illegal immigrants being given "free cars". This week she bemoans the paper's demise, but also says the relatives of murder victims have been "blighted by the actions of this newspaper", describes the hacking as "indefensible", and says she's "sorry for the sins of people who've hurt you and who shame us all".