29 April 2019

The Guardian: Gary Jones on taking over Daily Express: ‘It was anti-immigrant. I couldn’t sleep’

In his first morning news meeting, the team presented him with a standard-issue set of Daily Express story ideas. He gave an instruction to staff on the spot: “I’m not going to be doing an anti-immigrant story. Ever. Do not put them on the schedule.” [...]

Since then Jones has removed the Express’s frontpage claim to be the ”world’s greatest newspaper”, along with its inaccurate weather forecasts. He has placed an emphasis on exclusive, original, campaigning and investigative stories about care home abuse and the NHS, while turning down coverage of Tommy Robinson and Steve Bannon – claiming that, nowadays, “the BBC gives far more airtime to rightwing propagandists” than his outlet does. [...]

Last month, the Express news team moved to Canary Wharf, where it shares an open-plan newsroom with the Mirror and the Star, with all outlets increasingly sharing content due to financial pressures. Jones, who still uses a vintage pre-smartphone era Nokia 6310, has control over the 314,000 circulation print newspaper. But he does not have day-to-day control of the the Daily Express website, which has different editorial standards, including a dedicated UFO section, and recently ran a story suggesting Angela Merkel was making secret hand signals to the Illuminati.

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