Quotes of the Week: From smoking gun to ex-PM

Ex-News of the World Royal reporter Clive Goodman on phone hacking in a letter to News International's director of human resources Daniel Cloke: "This practice was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the editor...Tom Crone [the NoW lawyer] and the editor promised on many occasions that I could come back to a job at the newspaper if I did not implicate the paper or any of its staff in my mitigation plea. I did not, and I expect the paper to honour its promise to me."

Celia Walden, journalist, author and wife of Piers Morgan, in The Lady magazine on phone hacking: "I thought people got so pompous about it...A lot of journalists I know have had first-hand experience of it."

From a note by analysts from Citigroup, as reported by the Guardian, on Trinity Mirror and phone hacking: "Management say they have received assurances from senior editors, but we note allegations of phone-hacking in Mirror papers in the press (Guardian). The CEO told us not to believe everything we read in the press. This is not a risk we think investors should take on lightly, especially given the sums of money involved."

Peter Preston in the Observer: "The technique of the running blog, updated minute by minute, offers more detail than any conventionally orchestrated broadcast can do. It is not about men in suits with open-neck shirts and microphones. It's about facts, rippling apprehensions, perceptions. It's inclusive, not exclusive".

Paul Lewis in the Guardian on covering the riots: "The first portal for communicating what we saw was Twitter. It enabled us to deliver real-time reports from the scene, but more importantly enabled other users of Twitter to provide constant feedback and directions to troublespots. While journalists covering previous riots would chase ambulances to find the frontline, we followed what people on social media told us. By the end of the week, I had accumulated 35,000 new Twitter followers."

Gordon Brown at the Edinburgh Festival: “In Britain, what the press do, if they really want to get at someone, is they challenge their motives and their integrity. They try to suggest that they’re not the person that they say they are. The way the press works in this country is they try to doubt the motives of people all the time. They try to suggest that you’ve got a malign purpose in what you’re doing. And they try to take pieces of people’s characters and destroy those pieces so they can make their political point as a result of that. You can’t say it is not hurtful.”