Column: NYTimes, Guardian Broke Murdoch Story Wide Open

Thursday, 21 July 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Washington Post media columnist Paul Fahri takes a fascinating look at how two newspapers on opposite sides of the Atlantic—the New York Times and the Guardian—worked together to break the Murdoch hacking story. Apparently, there was a phone call between Times editor Bill Keller and his counterpart at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, in early 2010 that got the ball rolling.

At the time, the Guardian was the only UK paper still pursuing the story after police closed their investigation into the News of the World back in 2007. Keller assigned three reporters and sent them to London, not in “an attempt to embarrass News Corp. at a time when the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal had started a New York edition in direct competition with the Times” but because ” it seemed like a good time to bring this amazing yarn to the attention of American readers.”

The Post also has a good graphic, outlining the sequence of events that ultimately put Murdoch in the hot seat earlier this week.