Wednesday, August 31, 2011

#NOTW Stuart Kuttner 'Out on a Limb'

By Jack Lundin

The latest revelations of dirty tricks at the News of the World have brought it all flooding back: Fleet Street as it was, newsrooms clouded in cigarette smoke, pounding typewriters, thundering presses shaking the whole building ­– and Stuart Kuttner.

Kuttner was managing editor of the now mercifully-defunct News of the Screws for more than 20 years, until his abrupt removal in 2009 after a former private detective accepted cash payments from the paper’s royal editor for stories harvested by hacking into Prince Harry and Prince William’s voicemails.

Stuart Kuttner former managing editor of News of the World

At the Screws, Kuttner was the money man, a coldly-calculating master plotter and manipulator of all that was squalid, unfair and dishonourable. Our paths crossed, and clashed, at the now-also-defunct (London) Evening News, shortly before he took his murky talents to the News of the World. At the News Kuttner held a senior executive role and ran the paper’s investigations. It was 1978 and I was knocking out diary stories for the News’s diary editor, Richard Compton-Miller.... read more





http://www.noseweek.co.za/article/2580/Out-on-a-limb