Sometimes a story needs to be filed as it is happening. Sports stories, major disasters and other breaking stories mean having to ensure that you get time away from finding the story in order to be able to file it or find yourself somewhere suitable in order to keep up a running report. If you are aiming for a newspaper or broadcast news bulletin, this is getting more and more difficult as technology in-creases your ability to publish. 'Whether for a radio bulletin or for the voracious appetite of an on-line web site or 24-hour news channel you may have to make time to send over a report. That is easier now with mobile phones. Just turn away from the story and send your copy by phone. For radio and TV, that may well be done with a live link. A time will be arranged and at that time the bulletin will switch to your outside broadcast link and your words and pictures will be transmitted direct to the waiting public. For radio this can be done by phone but TV still requires a more sophisticated link in order to send the video signal.

Although each bulletin needs to be treated as a separate, updated news item, you need to be sure that you repeat the essential information ear ly on for people who have only just tuned in. The Hatfield train crash happened in day time and so the first many people would have heard of it was their radio in the car on the way home or the main news bulletin on the TV. On a story that's breaking as fast as this, a new nose or intro (the introductory paragraph of the story) is needed for those people who have already heard the news, but we don't want to confuse the new listeners and, so the main information needs to be added early on in the story.