Former Sunday Telegraph editor Sarah Sands said her new role as editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest UK will allow her to focus on stories with lasting quality, which she said are lacking in newspapers in the age of new media.
Sands, who will leave her role of consulting editor at the Daily Mail at the end of April to take up her new post, told Press Gazette the appeal of Reader’s Digest was it being ‘a newspaper, book and magazine all in one”.
She said: ‘If you bring newspaper journalism into this new form that’s a really exciting prospect, especially when some newspapers seem to have given up on the idea of the great narrative because they’re more interested in sound bites and the internet form. The idea of the perfectly told story is very appealing. Most of the things you read today don’t have lasting quality.”
Sands was ousted as editor of the Sunday Telegraph two years ago because of her resistance to seven-day working across the daily and Sunday titles as well as to their combined websites.
She said: ‘There is a sense that newspapers deal with fear and misery. The truth is most people want to live their lives decently and I think that needs to be reflected in some way.”
Reader’s Digest has a circulation of 750,000 a month.
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