Yesterday afternoon my colleagues and I were positing about the fact that this Sunday's News of the World would be a collectors' edition as it would not carry any advertising.

Just minutes later the statement from News International announcing the closure of the paper arrived, to the stunned reaction of all. This, after all, was the first UK newspaper Rupert Murdoch purchased, back in 1969, and he fought off Robert Maxwell to do so. Thus, Thursday 7 July 2011 became one of life's momentous news days for everyone involved in media and the newspaper industry.

It's been wall-to-wall commentary on every conceivable communication channel since and the fall-out is still to be calculated.

For us here in the printing industry there are some very immediate and obvious issues. The News of the World has an audited circulation of 2.65m copies a week, of which more than 2.5m are paid for at the full rate, hence its claim to fame as the UK best-selling newspaper.

After this weekend's final edition, there'll be a News of the World-shaped hole in the production schedules at Newsprinters. This, like the multi-million pound commercial and personnel costs associated with closing the paper will ultimately be Rupert Murdoch's problem.

There'll also be a large amount of newsprint tonnage going spare. And what about NI's contract printers? Over at Prinovis in Liverpool a rather large gap will open up in the schedules - even on fast, wide gravure presses, circa 3m copies a week of the NoTW's 72pp Fabulous magazine takes up quite a chunk of press time, estimated to be in the order of four days of dedicated production on one of its presses. And then there's the associated finishing and polybagging.

What about all the paper tonnage that will be in the pipeline for the magazine, too? And what of all the other printers engaged in producing millions of inserts to go into this paper? Oof.

Of course Prinovis has a contract and no doubt NI will have to meet its obligations under it. It also seems likely that because of this (and because the magazine is very successful) Fabulous will continue to be published and will be incorporated into one of The Sun's editions at least in the short-term, so it doesn't sound like it will be going away altogether.

It's inconceivable to me that News International will not return to the Sunday market with a new title - speculation about plans for some sort of variant of The Sun on Sunday is already rife. The question is how long the print hiatus will last in the meantime in order for News International to observe the requisite period of hand-wringing and rolling around on the carpet.

The last thing the high-volume end of our industry needs right now is a fall in demand of this magnitude. Just as the knock-on effects of the phone hacking scandal are likely to spread to other parts of newspaper-land (Max Clifford: "This is going to frighten a lot of other people in Fleet Street"), so the NoTW's demise has the potential to cause contagion elsewhere in print.

*Credit to our production ed Nick Mansley for coming up with the headline I freely admit to pinching for this blog.