The (Friday) Evening Standard’s cost-cutting regime continues in earnest. Just as Tom Newton Dunn started his column…
Guido hears that their brutal restructuring programme involves cutting the news desk roughly in half. Worse than that, the email informing them of impending doom turned up in inboxes at 8:30 p.m. last Thursday. An hour and a half before the exit poll and as everyone was gearing up to pull a stint of all-night reporting…
That fired quite the missile into morale. Just the atmosphere you need in the office when preparing to run a skeleton crew…
Congratulations to Tom Newton Dunn on returning to the political media fray with a regular column at the burgeoning Evening Standard. Oh, wait…
Newton Dunn’s first piece (described by a member of staff as “some bollocks about Whitby Woman“) was scheduled to be a regular column in the struggling paper. The Standard has now announced it is pulling its five-day printing format and going weekly amid impending job cuts. The paper is having to rid itself of expensive talent – will there still be room for Tom’s wisdom?
The Evening Standard has pulled its five day week printing format, opting to print the paper just once a week instead. In a memo to staff today, the Chairman of the 197-year-old publisher, Paul Kanareck said “substantial losses” in recent years means it needs to “reshape the business”. Goodbye to the paper boys outside the tube stations each day…
From the first of next month, Emily Sheffield will replace George Osborne as editor of the Evening Standard. Osborne himself will move upstairs to editor-in-chief. Osborne has overseen tens of millions in losses at the paper and had no idea how to turn it around. As many have pointed out, Sheffield is Samantha Cameron’s sister.
After 3 wonderful years I’m stepping down as @EveningStandard editor to become editor-in-chief. Thanks to the team who’ve made the paper a must read + helped me steer it through the greatest crisis in its history,never missing an edition & producing some of its finest journalism
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) June 12, 2020
Very proud to be the announced as the new Editor of the Evening Standard. It has been a core part of my daily life since I moved to London aged 18. And spent five formative years there as a young journalist in my 20s. @standardnews @mrevgenylebedev @George_Osborne
— Emily Sheffield (@emilysheffield) June 12, 2020
She is charged with making it a profitable digital first offering. That’s not an easy trick for a paper dependent on property and consumer advertising with little must read content. Congratulations!
In a marked departure from the attitude he would have taken in office, George Osborne’s newspaper has published a guide to today’s Black Lives Matter protests, set to begin in Hyde Park. The Standard advises those choosing to break the lockdown to wear “non-identifiable clothing” to make it harder for the police to identify criminals, and which won’t help with organisers’ first request of “remain peaceful”. The organisers also envisage the need for “shatter resistant Swimming Goggles” and “shoes you can run in” for a planned “peaceful protest”…
The Standard also directs readers to the website of Green and Black Cross, an anarchist legal aid service that is avowedly anti-police. If the paper’s retail advertisers get their windows smashed in this afternoon, am sure they will appreciate the advice given to those planning looting and rampaging. Guido’s not sure The Standard’s crime and coronavirus-riddled London audience will thank them for the stance they’ve taken on this one…
The Commons’ first Saturday sitting since 1982, intended for MPs to finally vote on Boris’s Brexit deal before MPs voted to delay the vote and further sabotage Brexit, cost the taxpayer £115,000. And remainers are calling the cost of Big Ben bonging ‘pointless’…
The sum, discovered thanks to an Evening Standard FoI request was spent on broadcasting and extra staffing costs and all thrown down the toilet thanks to rebel former-Tory MPs abanding the opportunity to get Brexit done and close up a loophole in the Surrender Act Boris wasn’t even planning on using. All in a day’s work…
