Sarah Sands: Standard has a strong future

Sarah Sands has moved swiftly to reassure London Evening Standard staff that the newspaper has a "strong and distinct" future, and she will not be in the office to edit for most of April while she works on a strategic plan for the London freesheet. Sands, who takes over from Geordie Greig as editor of the Standard at the end of April, attempted to calm staff with an email fired off within 90 minutes of proprietor Evgeny Lebedev's publicly planning for integration between the Independent, i and Standard. Lebedev tweeted at 11.41am on Monday that Chris Blackhurst, the editor of the Independent, had been named group editorial director given the task of handling future integration. Sands then hurriedly fired off an email at 1.17pm in a bid to reassure staff, who interpreted the tweet as a potential precursor to cutbacks and job losses, that any integration would be sensitive to the Evening Standard. "I wanted to reassure everyone that the Evening Standard has a strong and distinct future and we shall continue to operate as a successful newspaper," said Sands, who was promoted from deputy editor on Friday . "Any integration will always be sensitive to the separate and vivid journalistic personality of the Evening Standard." In November, Lebedev moved to integrate the sports and business desks of the Independent and London Evening Standard to "maintain our high quality journalism and reduce costs in an economic climate which has hurt the whole newspaper industry.". In the email Sands also intriguingly told staff that she would not be taking up the editorship day-to-day in the office until late April. "I am out of the office until later in April in order to form a creative plan with Evgeny for the long-term future of the newspaper," she said. There has been some speculation that Lebdev is seeking to maintain editorial distance during the run-up to the London Mayoral election between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson on 3 May – Johnson is a friend of Sands and voiced his support for her to take the editorship of the Standard. On Tuesday, the Independent's Saturday edition editor Archie Bland, the son of former BT chairman Sir Christopher Bland, was appointed as deputy editor of the Independent. The 28-year-old, who on Saturday won the last ever edition of The Weakest Link , will become the second deputy editor of the Independent. The senior deputy editor is Dan Gledhill, athough when Gledhill is unavailable Richard Askwith stands in. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email [email protected] or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook .