[AP videotape: The Year in Pictures]

Timothy Garton Ash: We live in an age when the distinction between the coverage and the event has actually broken down.

Susan Moeller: 24/7 live coverage of this past year has brought us more truths perhaps than we've seen before.

Stephen Lewis: And they have galvanised a public response, undoubtedly. I kept on thinking to myself: Three million people in sub-Saharan Africa are going to die this year

Ken Wiwa: 24-hour news is undoubtedly a good thing. The pictures that are selected are the ones that trigger all those clichéd reactions in a Western audience, whereas an African seeing the coverage of Africa doesn't necessarily see the Africa that they know. You're sort of encouraged by that, but you hope it's not just a season of Africa.

Timothy Garton Ash: And I see a whole generation of deeply engaged citizens, bloggers, who live on this extraordinary information feed. But the world is still, in many places, filled with people who can't read and write.

Susan Moeller: We have the cellphone pictures from the London bombing. They were able to show what they saw. Even the BBC, even the Associated Press, can't be everywhere. And I think it increased our perspective on it, if not necessarily our understanding of it.

Akbar Ahmed: I think that the Western media's interpretation and projection of Islam - these have been tragic. They can move civilisations in one direction and another direction. And they have, it appears, abdicated this huge responsibility, and they've simply added fuel to the fire.

Timothy Garton Ash: The New York Times led us up the garden path on weapons of mass destruction over Iraq. And these stories are corrected on the Web and in the blogosphere.

Susan Moeller: People today, they don't want the same thing, delivered in the same way, by the same people. They want to hear multiple voices. They want to see multiple perspectives.

Timothy Garton Ash: It is extraordinary that in a multimedia, multi-channel world, we can somehow only have one event at a time. [During Katrina], there was nothing else on CNN and Fox, 24 hours a day. It was absurd.

Stephen Lewis : Nothing prevents 24-hour news from sitting down with itself and saying: Let's be more searching, let's be more analytic.

Bernard-Henri Lévy: There is a moment when the emotion itself decreases, and a moment from which this terrible event becomes just a sort of “natural” event, belonging to the order of the world.

Ken Wiwa: There comes a point when somebody has to put in context what we're actually looking at. Everybody's competing. Everybody must come out with the most incredible pictures, and you just don't have time to step back and analyse it. It's just too much.

Susan Ormiston (presenter and correspondent, CBC News): When I first saw that video yesterday, my first reaction was: What an immense privilege we have, to tell these stories to the rest of the world. What a fantastic business we're in. What we're here today to talk about is 24-hour news, seven days of coverage, rolling news. Have we created a model that's working or does it need a rework? The presenters in the video challenged us to take a step back, be more critical, analyse it a bit - that's what we're here for. My job is to probe and provoke you to think about what we're doing, and to answer some of the questions we're going to pose. I urge you to be candid, leave platitudes aside, to be self-critical, to analyse and take a step back.

It's an interesting morning to be talking about 24/7 news. Last night was Paris, and this morning it's Amman. [CNN correspondent] Nic Robertson went scurrying off last night to Amman - he got the call at dinner here. And that's the kind of challenges we face. It's so fast. It seems that these massive, violent events come at us more and more rapidly. And with the explosion of 24/7 news, we see them coming at us faster and faster. So how do we handle that? As we were preparing in the last few days for this conference, we were looking at: Is Paris burning? We want to start today with some analysis of how we covered that event. It took two weeks to develop; it was sparse pictures in the beginning

[Video of the Paris riots of October/November 2005]

Susan Ormiston: I'm going to ask Chris Cramer to give us his take on how we did on covering the French riots.

Chris Cramer (managing director, CNN International): Forgive me. If I'd known we had to leave platitudes aside, I might have thought twice about coming. But I'll try and rise to the challenge of not giving out too many. I don't know how the plurality of the media in this room did. As far as CNN is concerned, in the first two or three days, I doubt we reported very much at all. In most major cities of the world, on some nights, cars are set on fire, police are deployed - that's not internationally remarkable.

My recollection is that on Day 4 or Day 5 our interest was piqued, and we deployed the modest operation that we have in Paris, to take a look at it and do some early reporting. By Day 6 or Day 7, it was very obvious that it was more than your average inner-city event, and we deployed no more than 10 people - probably three or four crews, three or four correspondents - and by that time it was clearly out of the norm. It had some political implications, and clearly there was great interest overseas - a lot of interest in the U.S.

Susan Ormiston: Was that the natural evolution of that event, or were we too late in jumping onto that story?

Chris Cramer: No, not at all. It's the role of national broadcasters and national news operations to report their countries and to determine whether it's extraordinary, significant or a regular occurrence. It's the job of pan-regional news players, whether they're English-language or vernacular, to explain that story when it gets to a certain level to their audiences. It's debatable as to whether you're a day late or a day early in that. But if we analyse it 13, 14 days on, it was a very significant story in France, and in Europe - great interest around the world, because it touched a number of buttons around the world.

Susan Ormiston: Jean-Claude Dassier, how do you think the coverage went by the pan-regional news organisations covering the story in your country?

Jean-Claude Dassier (director general, LCI [by satellite from Paris]): First of all, I'd like to give you some news of what happened last night in France. The unrest is gradually diminishing somewhat. The riots, and the unrest in the suburbs, are slowly decreasing. The movement is not yet over; hundreds of cars were torched last night. But we believe the movement is slowly decreasing.

What did we think about the coverage by the foreign news organisations? We thought it was somewhat over the top. CNN for the first time has given headlines to the events in France, but although they had analysed things in a very precise way, we thought that the place given to this news by CNN and the other Anglo-Saxon channels was a bit excessive. We found comments somewhat over the top. We thought that the people invited, who were interviewed, were not always chosen in the best possible way. I'm not here to criticise the work of my colleagues. Nevertheless, I think that all this lacked moderation.

I would like to reassure our English and American friends that life goes on in Paris. Life goes on in the suburbs as well. We may have had some problems with maintaining law and order. We've had violent events, which came as a surprise to all of us. I'm not saying that all of this is unimportant, but I am saying that it's first and foremost an issue of maintaining law and order. We haven't been able to demonstrate that there was an organised political structure behind these events. No one was able to show that there was a connection with any religious organisation. We should be watchful of course, but our problem, first of all, is to re-establish order. We have to control these young people. The unrest has spread, but it should be seen as a problem of law enforcement. What happened, of course, challenges French society, and there will be political consequences.