Earlier in the day, we had a live blog going on a major incident about a fire in a Cambridgeshire village that saw a lorry and a car engulfed in flames. The road, on High Street in Linton, was closed for several hours due to the explosion and caused major disruption throughout the day.

Once the blog was up and running, I was tasked with feeding updates through and obtaining all the information required to develop the story, which included emailing the fire and rescue service for a statement, as well as gathering pictures from residents who were on the scene and sent them through to our newsdesk inbox. The latter of which we decided would make an ideal opportunity for doing a photo story breakout based on what was sent to us.

Even though the photos had been sent to us by eye-witnesses, we still had to ask to make sure they were comfortable with us using them. There had been occasions in the past where we had used pictures sent to us and then ended up getting invoices, so we had to make sure that didn’t happen, and thankfully, the people who sent the photos in to us were happy for them to be used as long as we gave them credit for their work.

When writing this story, I also needed to be familiar with all the facts from the incident so I could include in the copy as well as choose the right photos that would add colour to the piece. Although a vast amount of the information was already in the blog and subsequent breakouts, the photo story was an article that our readers were likely to gravitate to and we wanted anyone who was viewing it to make sure they were up to date with the incident.

This story also shows how crucial it is to keep an eye on the newsdesk inbox when it comes to photos of incidents that are currently ongoing. Reporters may not be able to get to them in time before it is all cleared, so having eyewitnesses on the scene send content to us is not only really helpful and adds to our story, but it also shows that our audience is invested in our coverage of hard, breaking news, allowing us to present the facts and photos in a really thorough way that helps to make us stand out amongst other news sites.

Major incidents such as this often do really well on CambridgeshireLive and this one was no exception. The photo story did thousands of page views, which further highlights the importance of hard news on our site.