Guardian Loses Readers Even After Ousting Murdoch Tabloid

The U.K.’s Guardian took down Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper by exposing that the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid hacked a murder victim’s voicemail. It may still lose an intensifying battle for British readers.

The Guardian’s U.K. Web traffic fell 2.5 percent in July from the previous month, according to figures provided to Bloomberg by Comscore Inc., whose data is used by companies including Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. That’s even as Guardian reporters’ coverage of phone hacking at the News of the World forced News Corp. to shutter the title. Visits to the Daily Mail, U.K.’s most popular newspaper site, rose 5.2 percent. The Sun, another News Corp. title, was up 15 percent.