The final News of the World journalist to be convicted for his role in the phone-hacking scandal has been spared jail.

Features editor Jules Stenson is the ninth man to face punishment for the "dark art" which spawned a succession of sensational scoops in the Noughties but led to the Sunday tabloid's spectacular downfall in 2011.

Last December, Stenson, 49, from Battersea, south west London, pleaded guilty to plotting to hack phones between January 1 2003 and January 26 2007 in the wake of a string of his former colleagues' convictions.

He was responsible for recruiting prolific hacker Dan Evans who admitted his involvement and became the star witness in a succession of trials in which he implicated editor Andy Coulson and others.

Today, Mr Justice Saunders sentenced Stenson at the Old Bailey to four months in jail suspended for 12 months as well as 200 hours of community service.

The judge also ordered him to pay £18,000 in prosecution costs despite his guilty plea, plus a £5,000 fine.

The court heard that hacking was widespread in the NotW newsroom years before Stenson, under pressure from Coulson, brought it to the features department.

Both Coulson and Stenson attended a breakfast meeting with Evans when they discussed phone hacking as they poached him from the Sunday Mirror, prosecutor Julian Christopher QC said.

At the time there was intense competition between the news and features desks and Stenson took the attitude that "if you can't beat them, join them", Mr Christopher told the court.

Stenson now accepts that he knew Evans was a hacker but claims he was also recruited to head up an investigations unit which never materialised.

When Evans began work in January 2005, Stenson handed him a contacts list to get him started, but the features writer used his own list of celebrities and TV personalities to hack.

Phone records showed that, in a seven-month period in 2006, Evans intercepted voicemails on 120 occasions.

Among the famous personalities whose privacy was invaded to produce stories were actress Sienna Miller, TV personality Jade Goody, footballers Sol Campbell and Steven Gerrard, manager Sven-Goran Eriksson and boxer Amir Khan.

Mr Christopher said Stenson's knowledge of what was going on was apparent in emails and Evans always told his boss when information came from phone hacking so he could gauge its reliability.

When royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were caught hacking in 2006, Stenson told Evans there should be "no more hooky stuff".

Evans duly stopped, but started up again in 2009 when he was caught red-handed by Ms Miller's stepmother, interior designer Kelly Hoppen, the court heard.

Stenson, who is a father of three, was arrested in 2013, but made no comment in police interviews. The court was told that he was not formally asked whether he would give evidence in the trial of his co-defendant, deputy editor Neil Wallis, who was last week cleared of involvement.

In mitigation, his lawyer, James Hines QC, told the court that Stenson was put under intense pressure by Coulson but denied passing it on to Evans by telling him in an email he could "jump off a cliff" if he failed to produce good stories.

But Mr Justice Saunders observed that there was intense competition between newspapers at the time and it seemed "everyone's putting pressure on everyone, I suspect".

Mr Hines, who called for a suspended sentence, pointed out that, while it was prolific, the features hacking operation was nowhere near "the industrial scale" of the news department.

He added that Stenson "deeply regrets" his involvement in the conspiracy and is "truly sorry".

In his final sentencing remarks in the NotW legal saga, Mr Justice Saunders said that despite public interest "waning" since the public condemnation of the Milly Dowler hacking in 2011, he must still do justice between defendants.

He said: "It would be quite wrong for me to say that, as it has gone on so long and public interest is less, those convicted at the end of the series of trials should receive shorter sentences than those who were arrested earlier and sentenced in a blaze of publicity."

However, the judge took account of Stenson's guilty plea and said there were distinctions between his case and the others who worked on the news desk.

He said: "Phone hacking was a well established means of getting stories at the NotW before Mr Stenson became involved. He was put in a position of competing with people working on the news desk who he knew were phone hacking and his editor condoned the practice.

"It is likely that if he had not come up with stories, Jules Stenson would have lost his job. Further, the period over which the features department were phone hacking was comparatively short and there was only one person doing it - Dan Evans."

Mr Justice Saunders repeated his earlier comments on the "irony" of the phone hacking cases - that of all the defendants whose vocation was to "reveal information that the public have a right to know but others wish to keep secret" only Evans was prepared to say what went on.

Stenson broke down in the dock on hearing that he would not be going to jail and thanked the judge before he left court.