College Tribune | November 25th 2008
Features
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Reader’s Digest girl comes home Reader’s Digest editor Sarah Sands reflects on a long career in British newspapers and tells Andrew McGuinness about her plans for one of world’s best loved publications Arriving at the Reader’s Digest building, set amongst a raft of towering steel and glass buildings in east London’s Canary Wharf, I’m met by Hazel Gilbertson, PA to the editorin-chief. “Hello, my dear”, chirps a cheery Scottish accent. To those who know Sarah Sands, the appointment of Gilbertson was a welcome return. Hazel was Sands’ PA at the time of her dismissal from the top job at the Sunday Telegraph in March 2006, from a tall building a couple of hundred yards away in Canary Wharf. Future Fleet Street historians may reflect back on the positively Churchillian message the move has sent to the media class; “Sarah is back”. “I have always found Canary Wharf tremendously exciting so I love being back”, Sands says. “Straight away there is great drama: people are outside with removal boxes from Lehman Brothers, permanently clamped to mobile phones, drinking in the afternoon and smoking constantly. There’s something quite civilised about it all.” Sands took over as editor-in-chief of the UK and Ireland edition of Reader’s Digest to breathe new life into the magazine, much of which used to be bought from newspapers but is now generated in-house. She hopes to broaden its reach, arguing that gripping stories about real-life dramas will appeal to a family audience. “Reader’s Digest is always one of those publications that have a truly global reach. I remember it growing up in both Malawi and in England. My father was a Reader’s Digest character – a studious, well meaning man who went to Malawai thinking he could do a tremendous amount of good, and help ease the transition from colonialism to independence for the indigenous people. He is the son of a Methodist chaplain so he does have that altruistic streak that I think you see a lot of in Reader’s Digest.” The life and times of Sarah Sands could have been plucked from a thrilling essay in the publication she now edits. There’s been a healthy dollop of adventure, mischief, despair, occasional farce, and a sense of duty along the way. Having attended a local Methodist boarding school in Kent, Sands succumbed to the left wing views espoused by bands like the Clash and the Sex Pitols, recalling that it was
just another way of trying to destabilise the status quo. Her first marriage was to the actor Julian Sands, with whom she has one son, Henry, and she counts theatrical luminaries among her close friends,
“When people began to talk about content editors rather than journalists you sensed things had change forever. It is rather a glorious trade and I feel the romance has gone” including John Malkovich. “I studied English and Drama at Goldsmith College. It was a wild time. I first met Julian at a Sex Pistols gig. We were two punks, he was a Sting look-alike in his leather jacket and we used to listen to endless Police records. We married shockingly young.” The marriage ended soon after and Sands is now married to the journalist, Kim Fletcher, with whom she has two children. Sands has fond memories of her first real initiation into journalism. After work on her first day, she was taken out for drinks in El Vino on Fleet Street by a battle hardened crew of journalists that included. I was the provincial girl who up to that was more used to drinking bitter lemon. That first evening after drinking a couple of bottles wine I fell down the stairs and ended up in Guys Hospital, with my very disapproving sister coming to rescue me.” Primed for social intercourse having grown up in one of Middle England’s most celebrated towns Tunbridge Wells, Kent - Sarah Sands remains at heart a Thatcherite housewife, advocating hard work and education as the road to self-improvement. “In my twenties, I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to send a son to Westminster school and know I’m so thrilled that I have a son at Westminster. And that’s a very Reader’s Digest thing of the education being a very transformative process.” Reader’s Digest is available in 165 countries and reaches nearly 100 million readers, selling just under
700,000 copies in the UK and Ireland and remains a lucrative business and brand. The magazine presently sells 15,300 copies on subscription in the Republic of Ireland and around 3,500 on news stand sales. It is one of the few UK publishers to have converted its cover price into Euro. At a dazzling launch party in London’s Wallace Collection, where English rugby players mingled freely with former leaders of the Conservative Party and Nigella Lawson, an excolleague of Sands’ quipped to me; “It’s like the glory days of the Telegraph in the late nineties in here tonight”, a reference as much to the large number of former colleagues still in the court of Sands, as it was to the kind of loyalty she inspires. If her time at the Evening Standard molded Sands into a formidable interviewer and feature writer, becoming Charles Moore’s deputy at the Daily Telegraph finetuned the news and comment repertoire, and enabled her to make the transition to ruling editorial class. “The nice thing about being at the Telegraph was being with Charles Moore who’d I’d known slightly beforehand, and who was a terrific person to work with. He was there to provide the gravitas and it was my job to cause trouble really. It was tremendously fun time and Charles was a fantastic editor. I’m not sure they exist anymore – these editors were also known as great intellects and there was a lot of high table about leader conferences.” When Auberon Waugh - son of Evelyn - was on his deathbed, he made Sands promise she’d put a naked woman on the front of The Daily Telegraph. She kept her pledge, sneaking on a picture of a topless girl in 2004. Her new title is telling. This editorin-chief rules the roost and, unlike her stint at the Sunday Telegraph, doesn’t have to run around like the Mary Queen of Scots figure she giddily recalls, whispering ‘outrageous’ and ‘unfair’ after management appointed people over her to control her every move. What Sands puts forward is not some outdated, Arcadian view of a newspaper world that has gone forever. Rather it’s a sober acceptance that the heady days of what some have deemed ‘country-club’ antics
are long gone. Nowadays, hacks don’t have much scope to leave their desk for assignments or boozy lunches, are expected to work longer hours and put as much time into the next frontier of journalism – online content. “I may sound like a frightful old bore but when I started in newspapers it was really just for the fun of it”, Sands says. “You wanted to cause trouble and were a bit restless. And by the time I left it was all business of the most crushing kind. I think around the turn of the century when people began to talk about content editors rather than journalists you sensed things had change forever. It is rather a glorious trade and I feel the romance has gone. What’s very nice about Reader’s Digest is that people are interested in stories and the written word, and there’s tremendous attention to detail. I feel you get the best of journalism and something even nicer which is publishing. Journalism can be quite first draft, hasty and bru-
tal in some ways and there’s a lot due diligence here, and people tend to be a bit more cerebral and bookish.” From recent issues of the relaunched Reader’s Digest, it’s clear that Sands is not just targeting women in their forties in her attempt to bring a magazine synonymous with dentist’s waiting rooms to a younger audience. Michael Palin and Stephen Fry may have pitched in with features in recent issues, but recent cover stories essentially have had a gap year focus. “For students you get the sense of boys own adventure and the travelling experience from these stories – something which is a Reader’s Digest first principle.” And with that, Miss First Principles bounds off into the autumnal, Canary Wharf evening and into a waiting black cab. Fittingly the cab, whose meter has been running for sometime, has her name in block capitals in the window. Sarah Sands has come home and even the London cabbies know it.