Interviewees in  Marseille

It’s a couple of years since I returned to the core desk at World Online, where my desk work flips between writing the top story of the day and editing. I’ve had a couple of reporting trips to Spain in rapid succession, both to the same place, Catalonia – after the August terror attacks and following the referendum day violence on 1 October. The challenge on both occasions was to gather content on the move, which is what breaking news is all about, of course.

There was more time to prepare for a trip to Marseille in April as part of our French election coverage, looking at an initiative to encourage people on a deprived housing estate to vote. One novel aspect of the trip was blogging about it intensively on social media and pulling the words and images together into a Twitter Moment called “Election time in a French no-go zone”. The beauty of the medium is how you can use vertical video – the natural format for smartphones, of course. Phone-to-phone news.