Abstract
Askew, an award-winning regional editor, survived for just eight months as editor of the News of the World and then disappeared back into the provinces, never to take up full-time employment again. Askew recalls his career as a hard-working, hard-playing editor and observes: "I'm in my seventieth year now - it's a miracle I'm still here - and for the past ten years or so I've been pretty much retired... Quiet retirement, I suppose you'd describe it. Regrets - we've all got some of those. That the tenure at the News of the World wasn't longer, so I could have built on the initial success with the circulation and gradually transformed the paper in a way that would have had a lasting impact. I have a professional track record over decades of editing newspapers and doing reasonably well at it that will stand scrutiny by any standards, so it was frustrating not to be allowed to carry that forward in at least one arena where I thought I might have done so. The other one is I would have been a lot better off to have made the decision to go and work for a different kind of national newspaper, where my own strengths of investigative journalism might have had a better arena in which to be tested. Anything from the Mail on Sunday to The Sunday Times."
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