Eight of Fleet Street's most prominent tabloid journalists face multiple charges of phone hacking, the Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday, one year after the phone-hacking scandal erupted at Rupert Murdoch's best-selling Sunday tabloid, News of the World.

Journalists from the now-defunct News of the World (NoW) have protested their innocence after it was announced eight people are facing hacking charges.

Seven ex-staff members, including former editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, will be prosecuted for conspiring to intercept voicemails.

The CPS said the charges related to 600 alleged victims between 2000 and 2006.

Mrs Brooks said a charge relating to murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's voicemail was "particularly upsetting".

For more than 100 days during the past 11 months, many of the UK's most powerful people have appeared before Lord Justice Leveson to offer their thoughts on the future of the British press, following allegations newspaper employees had been illicitly hacking people's mobile-phone voicemail messages.

Now the oral hearings have come to an end at the Leveson Inquiry - expected to cost £5.6m - here is a look at its scale, how many words were spoken, who appeared, and which of the key witnesses struggled to remember.

Silence, then a lawyer's statement of regret, was all that emerged from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation after it emerged that two former editors, a managing editor, four senior reporters and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire faced 19 charges of conspiring to hack into phones.

For the past year, the media giant has increasingly acknowledged the gravity of the hacking crisis, starting with the closure of the News of the World - and recently deciding to spin off the Sun and the Times and its other newspapers to a separate company. The charging decisions now mean a high-profile courtroom airing of the phone-hacking story is inevitable.

It was possible that the CPS would choose not to lay charges, although Rebekah Brooks separately faces three obstruction of justice charges, while Andy Coulson has been charged with perjury by a Scottish court. A CPS decision to take no further action would have prompted a very different company reaction. But Alison Levitt QC, as the Crown Prosecution Service's principal legal adviser, concluded that prosecutions were required "in the public interest" - meaning the media group has to now endure the full exposure of trials: court cases in which all sorts of material could be aired, never mind witnesses demanded, in an adversarial environment.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) statement on Tuesday on Operation Weeting charging decisions repays careful reading.  Beneath the headline-grabbing decisions to charge eight people, there are details which are quite telling - particularly regarding Glenn MULCAIRE.

All, with the exception of Glenn Mulcaire, will be charged with conspiring to intercept communications without lawful authority, from 3rd October 2000 to 9th August 2006.

Two things here are of note:-

Britain's best-selling newspaper may become embroiled in the phone- hacking cases announced this week.

In a potential public relations setback for Rupert Murdoch's News International, one of the charges against his former protégé Rebekah Brooks covers the period when she was editing The Sun.

Mrs Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World, ex-news editor Greg Miskiw and Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective, are charged with plotting to hack the phone of the trade union leader Andy Gilchrist. The period covered by the charges is 3 December 2002 to 22 January 2003.

Mrs Brooks was promoted to the helm of The Sun in early 2003 and her first day as editor of the daily paper was 14 January that year. Six days later, The Sun published a story about the private life of Mr Gilchrist who, as general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, was leading a national strike.