Journalistic career

The sister of Kit Hesketh-Harvey of musical duo Kit and The Widow, Sands trained on The Sevenoaks Courier as a news reporter, before moving to the Evening Standard, initially as editor of the Londoner`s Diary, before taking further posts as features editor and associate editor.
She joined The Daily Telegraph in 1996 as deputy editor, under Charles Moore, later assuming responsibility for the Saturday edition.
She was appointed as the first female editor of The Sunday Telegraph in June 2005, succeeding Dominic Lawson. Her masterplan for the November 2005 relaunch of the paper was that it should be "like an iPod - full of your favourite things". In an abrupt move, after just eight months and 20 days in post, Sands was sacked as editor of the Sunday Telegraph on 7 March 2006 and replaced by Patience Wheatcroft.
Subsequently, many of her changes under her editorship were reversed (including changes to the title font).
In April 2006 she was appointed consultant editor on the Daily Mail;in February 2008 she was appointed editor-in-chief of the UK edition of Reader`s Digest. In February 2009 it was announced that she would be taking up the role of deputy editor on The Evening Standard.
Sands has written two novels; her first was Playing the Game and her second, Hothouse, was published during the summer of 2005.

Controversy

In August 2006, Sands wrote an article about the Emo musical genre, which stated that Green Day and My Chemical Romance encourage self-harm among teenagers, despite Green Day having tenuous links to the emo genre and My Chemical Romance advising their fans not to commit self-harm.
My Chemical Romance, on hearing about this article while on tour in the UK, led a chant of "fuck the Daily Mail" (as Sands`s article ran in this newspaper) during one of their live shows.
Kerrang! magazine in particular took offence at the article.