Alexandra Shulman and David Rennie and Susannah Herbert. Is this the beginning of a Telegraph group exodus? All three are genuine journalistic stars and their departures cannot have been warmly welcomed by their editors.
I always find Shulman's style notebook readable despite my lack of fashion knowledge (though I was delighted to see a couple of weeks ago that Alex and I were in agreement about the baffling return to popularity of leggings). As the editor of British Vogue she has status and authority. A little column, but a big loss.
It is rather obvious that the Telegraph thought a lot of Rennie, who is off to The Economist. He is therefore rejecting the promotion of just a week ago to be Europe editor, having shown his mettle as European correspondent in Brussels since January last year. The cerebral Rennie, son of a former head of MI6, has also proved to be an excellent blogger, as his June posting on the great Swift banking controversy in the States illustrated.
I've previously noted that Herbert, the Sunday Telegraph magazine honcho who is to become the Sunday Times literary editor, is also a great loss. She has been with the Telegraph group for more than 15 years and is the kind of skilled, passionate journalist the titles need to encourage.
Which reminds me of something written a couple of weeks ago by the excellent Shane Richmond, the Telegraph's online news editor. What we need to do in this digital age, he wrote, is build personalities: "The important thing to do is make sure your writers are the voices people want to hear. Some of your writers will be names already, the others need to be built into names." In other words, journalists with reputations - Shulman, Rennie and Herbert (and, incidentally, others who have been let go, such as
