The editorial director of Cumbrian Newspapers, Keith Sutton, is to retire later this year.

Currently editor of the Carlisle News & Star and the Cumberland News, Keith will step down on December 23 - his 60th birthday.

He and his wife, Stephanie Thompson, a former Observer and Sunday Times journalist, are looking forward to "hot footing it to Nice" where they own an apartment.

They will also spend two months in Australia before returning to England, where Keith will then spend some of his newly-found spare time doing consultancy work.

Keith (pictured) said: "Hopefully it will be slightly less hectic, but it will keep me in touch with the only job I have ever known."

He started out on the Surrey Advertiser and soon progressed to the Daily Sketch, where he worked on the sports desk, and then to the Daily Mail.

From there he moved to the Daily Express as a features sub, and also worked for the London Evening News leaving his full-time job to study for a history degree at Goldsmiths College.

Enjoying studying so much, Keith went on to do a PhD, but never completed it – instead returning to Fleet Street, working for newspapers such as the Sunday Mirror, Sunday Times and The Sun, and working alongside journalists such as Nigella Lawson and John Diamond.

But it was Rupert Murdoch’s withdrawal to Wapping, and the subsequent strike, that led to Keith’s first editorship – at the strike paper, the Wapping Post.

As a result he became launch editor of the short-lived national, News on Sunday, which closed in the mid 80s after just six months.

However he soon met an old school friend, Philip Davies, who had since become a millionaire and owned the North West Evening Mail.

Keith said: "I came up to redesign the paper and stayed on as editor. Then it was bought by Cumbrian Newspapers and they bought me with it!"

Keith is also the current president of the Society of Editors and helped devise the new course for editors at the University of Central Lancashire.

The course includes modules on topics such as people management, marketing and ethics, and Keith admits it may have helped him, had it been around when he first sat in the editor’s chair.

He said: "It would have been useful, but I think I learned a lot from the failure of News on Sunday. When it launched I was involved in recruiting 60 journalists from scratch on a low budget and had to promote it, doing a lot of TV and radio and public speaking.

"It was a practical course, but had I done the UCLAN course and known what I was letting myself in for as editor I almost certainly wouldn’t have taken the job!"

During his career Keith has seen some "fantastic changes", including the way newspapers are produced, which he says has had a knock-on effect on news gathering.

He said: "We’ve lost all the old comps and associated trades.

"My journalists here have often come from afar and in the past comps were part of a local intelligence network. Now we have to build new ways of gathering news from the community."

He added: "I’m proud to still be editor at 59 and still be physically fit enough to go out running two or three times a week.

"I’m proud of what the paper has achieved, especially during the foot and mouth outbreak when we really did explain to the whole world what was going on in farms in Cumbria.

"We brought home to people the financial, emotional and political impact of foot and mouth, we helped bring down Nick Brown for his handling of the situation and we played a part in the demise of the Ministry of Agriculture.

"In 2001 the Cumberland News was named Weekly Newspaper of the Year and Regional Newspaper of the Year, beating daily newspapers and in 2005 the News & Star is selling more copies than it did in 2000 – there aren’t many regional newspapers that can say that.

"I’m also very proud that several young journalists who I brought with me from Barrow to Cumbria are still with me. I’ve been very lucky in the people that I’ve met in this business and I’m going to miss the fantastic people that it is a pleasure to work with every day."