News donates £2.8

Final edition of the News of the World London - Arabstoday News International will donate £2.8m from the sale of the final edition of the News of the World (NoW) to charity, it emerged on Monday evening. Tom Mockridge, who replaced Rebekah Brooks as chief executive of the UK newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire in July, told staff in an email that the last copy of the Sunday tabloid sold 3.8m copies. The £2.8m figure was calculated after removing the 26p per copy charged by wholesalers and distributors. That money will be paid to Barnardo's, Forces Children's Trust and Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity – the three charities named in the paper when it published for the final time on 10 July, priced at £1. They will each receive £933,000. Mockridge said five charities in Ireland are splitting the profits from the Irish sale. Mockridge also told staff at News International, which also publishes the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times, that "65 former NoW staff have now been redeployed in jobs throughout [the company]". That figure includes 30 who were retained by Fabulous, the News of the World magazine which was retained and now appears as a supplement in the Sun each Saturday. It is understood that around 20 former NoW staff have applied for and been given jobs on the Sun, with a futher 11 handed posts on News International's digital startup, the details of which remain a closely guarded secret. A handful have moved to the Sunday Times and found jobs in the company's technology department. A total of 81 staff left when it was announced in July that the paper would close in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal. That means that a further one hundred or so of the paper's former staff, which totalled 250, have now been made redundant following the end of a three-month consultancy period last week. Mockridge said: "Since the closure of the paper, we have worked to find roles throughout the company for as many of those affected as possible. Of those who applied for jobs, two thirds were made an offer." Company sources said an additional 20 or so staff were offered jobs within the company but turned them down. There is huge anger among former employees about the closure of the paper. Most complain they have paid the price for the actions of a handful of senior staff and mismanagement by Brooks and other. Many of them insist privately they are struggling to find a job because of the damage done to the reputation of the paper in its final months.