Whenever there is a breaking news regarding a crash, police incident or live event in the county, I am usually one of the reporters who is tasked with setting up a live blog and providing updates as the event unfolds. During these times, I need to make sure that I’m quick off the mark with posting information as the situation could develop quickly and feeding this to our audience is of utmost importance.

One such example of this is back in February 2022, when there was a major incident in Huntingdon which saw a mystery illness outbreak at a Kindred Huntingdon Day Nursery and Pre-School. A small number of children and staff were reported to be unwell and a vast number of emergency services and organisations, including Cambridgeshire Constabulary and the UK Health Security Agency, were all involved.

Once the blog was up and running, I fed updates and statements into the blog as they came in and kept an eye on it throughout the day. I was also responsible for putting in pictures and video footage, which were coming in from other members of the team who were on the scene as well as quotes from parents, witnesses and emergency services who wee present.

I had to be careful with the quotes from witnesses as some of them were off the record and a vast majority of them did not want to be named, which was understandable as they may say something that they feel they may later regret. To remedy this, any interviews/quotes that were provided from the scene were kept anonymous, while those from emergency services were made public as they were official bodies.

This was a massive live blog because there were bits and pieces of information that were spread out across the day and there was a need to jump on any detail that could go out as a blog post as there was a huge possibility that there were hundreds of thousands of people on our site checking for the latest updates. As it turned out, the blog did over 200,000 page views, which is the highest amount I have received for any blog I have done.

In addition, the live blog/story was also picked up by both the Mirror and the Daily Star, meaning that the updates I was providing were reaching a national audience. The incident also spawned multiple breakouts, including a photo story, showing that there was a lot of scope for a follow-up.