Tag Archives: neville thurlbeck

Neville Thurlbeck swaps journalism for PR with new role

Leave a reply

Former News of the World chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck is moving from journalism to PR – becoming public relations director for the forces charity Talking2Minds, which helps soldiers, sailors and airmen recover from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Over the past few weeks, I have been devising a campaign to bring this charity to greater national attention,” Thurlbeck writes on his blog.

“Finally and for the first time in my life some might say, I have found a ‘proper’ job.”

Thurlbeck was arrested as part of the Metropolitan police investigation into alleged phone-hacking, Operation Weeting, last April and is on police bail until next month. He is pursuing an employment tribunal claim against News International.

Financial Times: Sunday version of the Sun on hold due to arrests

Leave a reply

Sean Dempsey/PA

The Financial Times is reporting that the launch of a Sunday newspaper “to replace the News of the World” has been delayed due to the arrests of News International journalists at the weekend.

On Saturday (28 January), four current and former Sun journalists were arrested by officers working on Operation Elveden, the Met team looking into illegal payments to police.

The FT reports that a launch date of 29 April had “been set in stone”. Journalism.co.uk heard late on Friday, the day before the arrests, that the launch date had been brought forward.

The insiders said that managers of News International had decided that the adverse publicity surrounding the arrests and the suspension of the four journalists while police inquiries were going on would hamper any possible launch of a new title, which earlier reports said would be called the Sun on Sunday.

The article includes a comment from anonymous insiders, plus an interview with former chief reporter at the News of the World Neville Thurlbeck.

Mr Thurlbeck said that an internal group, the management and standards committee, set up at the direction of Rupert Murdoch to co-operate with a police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, had handed over so much material that it had lost control of the situation.

“The staff [of the Sun] have lost trust in their own management because they [the MSC] don’t believe that they know what is contained in the material that the police now have.”

The FT adds that News International declined to comment.

The full Financial Times article is at this link [part-paywall].

Press Gazette: Neville Thurlbeck tells his part in ‘Jacobean revenge drama’ of hacking

Leave a reply

Neville Thurlbeck, the former chief reporter at the News of the World, has penned a first person account of his part in the phone-hacking saga.

The eloquent Thurlbeck certainly doesn’t hold back in the dramatic stakes:

After years of sitting silently in the wings while a bloody Jacobean revenge tragedy played out on the stage, you probably wonder why I have finally decided to cast myself in a speaking role and stroll briefly onto the stage that bears the corpse of my former newspaper.

As he did in his short statement to the cameras last week, Thurlbeck backs the assertion by News International executives that the evidence was kept from them, claiming there was a “pattern of withholding information”.

Well worth a read, do so on Press Gazette here.