FOLKLORE at The Northern Echo tells of the night, in the dim and distant past, when the editor was busily trying to rewrite the front page on General Election night while sloshed on the bottle of whisky he'd brought in to see him through the early hours.

His staff were terrified he was so far gone that he'd get the result wrong and the paper would go down in history for all the wrong reasons.

Thankfully, they managed to usher him back to his office and make sure the right Prime Minister was heading to Downing Street before the presses began to roll.

It was a tale which was recalled by the revelations last week of former England cricket coach Duncan Fletcher.

Fletcher has been spilling the beans about Andrew Flintoff's boozy benders during his captaincy of the England team during the disastrous tour of Australia.

Whether it's writing a historic front page for a newspaper or leading your country on the cricket field, you can't have someone in charge who doesn't know what day of the week it is.

So why didn't Fletcher just sack Flintoff rather than wait a year to expose details of his captain's disgraceful lack of professionalism?

The answer is simple. It's the same one which explains why England legends Lawrence Dallaglio and Mike Catt - from that terribly gentlemanly sport of rugby - are busy sticking the knife into national head coach Brian Ashton.

They've all got books to flog.

THERE have been many influences on my career and Jon Smith has certainly been among them. Jon, now a journalism lecturer at Darlington College, was the scary chief sub-editor of The Northern Echo when I started in 1984.

He had a zero tolerance approach to sloppy English and never failed to make his dissatisfaction known in fairly blunt terms. I didn't like him then but I've grown to appreciate him more as the years have gone by.

The other day a signed copy of Jon's new book - Essential Reporting - landed on my desk and it is typically excellent.

The book is a guide for trainee journalists and features plenty of advice and anecdotes from a range of contributors. My favourite is from Brian Tilley, Deputy Editor of the Hexham Courant: "Reporting local sport can be as difficult as reviewing amateur dramatics - nothing but unadulterated praise will do.

"When I covered a semi-professional football team, I rode my motorbike to the ground and then caught the team coach.

"One week, after suggesting in print that the centre-half had lost a bit of pace as he turned 40, he handed me my crash helmet as I got off the coach.

"It was full of beer - pints of it, all strained through his kidneys during the trip."

OUR chief reporter David Roberts was invited to speak to Year 7 pupils at Darlington Education Village the other day.

David set the youngsters an exercise in writing an "intro" - the crucial first paragraph of a story - telling them to include the pertinent points while keeping it concise.

He passed on the advice he'd been given at journalism college. "Imagine you're telling the story to a friend in a pub because it helps you get to the nub of what's happened."

David wisely changed "the pub" to "the playground"

for the purposes of the exercise and the children enthusiastically set about their task.

The results were generally excellent, apart from one boy who took David's advice a touch too literally and started his story: "Alright mate, how's it going"