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Former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne is to stand down from his role as editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper.
Osborne took on the job in March 2017, after having held the nation’s purse-strings from 2010-2016.
He juggled his latest media job with several other roles, including a £650,000-a-year post advising the investment fund BlackRock.
He is also chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.
Last year he was made chairman of a panel of advisers to Exor, which owns Juventus football club and has major stakes in Ferrari and Fiat Chrysler cars.
Mr Osborne left government in 2016 after the Brexit referendum and he stood down as MP for Tatton in Cheshire in 2017.
Prior to the Covid-19 lockdown, the Evening Standard’s circulation was about 800,000 daily copies in the capital, but it was struggling due to an industry-wide decline in advertising revenues.
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Circulation figures published in April suggested the paper’s readership had fallen by 11% as the UK entered lockdown. It is expected to have lost even more readers since then.
Last month the industry’s auditor said newspapers will no longer have their sales figures automatically published.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), which records and audits sales, usually publishes figures every month.
But ABC said publishers were growing concerned about a “negative narrative of decline” in newspaper sales.
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