Deborah Turness (editor, ITV News): I want to share an example that highlights the competing pressures in 24-hour news to both be first and fast, and to be accurate. On the morning of July 7 this year, news came through that there was an event on the London Underground, but that it was caused by an electrical problem, a power surge. We realised clearly that trains had crashed and people were coming up from the Underground covered in blood. But the authorities kept insisting this was caused by a power surge, and that's what we all reported.

Then came the moment when we heard that a bus had blown up - clearly not connected to the power surge on the Underground. At that point, we chose on ITV News, on the news channel, which was being simulcast on the network channel by then, to put up the strap: Terror Attacks. And the BBC, under the pressure to be accurate and wait for that to be sourced, for quite a long time afterward, chose to not go with that. I can't remember what you did at Sky, John - you might have gone with “terror attacks” at about the same time we did. But it was a really interesting example of what do you do in that dilemma - the police won't confirm it, but it's obvious.

Helen Boaden: I think we've learned a lot from that. The actual studio discussion, with the information coming in, was saying, there's been a bomb on a bus, but the strap didn't change. And what we know about audiences is that they go to the strap first - the eye is drawn. And it's one of the issues, as we get more understanding of audiences understanding that stories unfold and change, you can take a bit more of a risk - even as the BBC. If you got that wrong on the bulletin, you wouldn't be forgiven. But in an unfolding story, and especially with the use of straps - straps and headlines are something we're looking at really seriously in terms of News 24 because we realise that they condition the sense of the story as the audience comes in immediately.

Can I just build on the point about websites? Of course there's a lot of rubbish information on websites, but what you essentially have to have is good expertise, either within your organisation - we've got Frank Gardner, who's an absolutely outstanding security correspondent - or very good external experts, who can, as Chris phrases it, share with the audience what we do and don't know about these websites: "Yes, there's a website. It's claiming responsibility. We know it's not actually very reliable. We know this goes on a lot." That's the kind of information that is not pinning down a fact - it's sharing a kind of lack of knowledge, but through someone who's very experienced. And, again, trust the audience. They're very sophisticated about this. They get it.

Susan Ormiston: From the London bombing story, am I correct to say that you have now been quoted as saying that your service will be more right than first, that you've backed off being first?

Helen Boaden: God, no. We don't get up in the morning saying, "Let's be second!" We get up in the morning saying, "Let's be winners! Let's be first!" But we know that, for the BBC, and I don't mean this in any derogatory way, but because of our history and because we're funded by public money, the audience has very high expectations of accuracy and is slightly less forgiving towards us if things go wrong.

I think it's not an either/or. I think it's about being first and being right - although if you push me, if it came to the crunch, I think if it was an area of fact where the sources were highly contradictory, we would probably pause, possibly longer than our competitors, to firm something up. And that's in the nature of our DNA. But I don't think it has to be a contradiction. I think you can be first and you can be right, and there are lots of practitioners around here who manage to do both, as we do, very often.

Chris Cramer: I'm going to break the habit of a lifetime and agree with Sky News. I keep pinching myself in the last few minutes. I love the sound bites you had from the collective dinosaurs above us, but this system of dissemination of news is a quarter of a century old. There are 72 continuous news channels around the world, and the 73 rd is on my right - CNN IBN in India - and it may be north of that figure. This is one enormous system to reach billions of people around the world and, respectfully, I kind of get tired that people say: “You know, I'm not sure this gimmick is going to work.” Well, get over it. It's a part of the fabric of news dissemination. It has its flaws, in exactly the same way the news bulletins that I was writing for 26 years ago had incredible flaws.

Helen Boaden: My sense of a lot of those people was that actually they're going back to a newspaper model. If you're talking about the front page of a newspaper, you probably have more words on a newspaper than you have in two days worth of bulletins and several hours of News 24. It's a different medium, and the public is leaving newspapers, and it's moving to telly and it's moving to online. You can't sack the audience, and they need to wake up to that.

Susan Ormiston: I don't think it's quite fair to say that they're dinosaurs or newspaper addicts. Having spoken to Stephen Lewis myself, he confesses he's a news junkie. His concern, among many, is that we are too slow to develop the broader stories behind a headline, and sometimes we don't - for example, that we are not very good at stories that develop slowly, like global climate change, that you much prefer to have a finite disaster on your news channel than something that you have to explain over a long time or, in Stephen's case, the tragedy of AIDS in Africa, which is his passion.

Heaton Dyer: I agree with both Helen and Chris. I think what they're talking about is probably a frustration that some of the issues and concerns they have does not get the same prominence as, say, a Katrina or an Amman bombing. That's just reality. I think that 24-hour news channels do devote significant amounts of time to coverage of issues like AIDS. It doesn't happen in a neat parcel in the way that would dominate the news agenda for a 24-hour or 48-hour period. Inevitably the stories that do dominate in a singular way create the impression that that's all we do. There are half a dozen of these major, dominating stories a year. There is a lot of time in between where in my experience most 24-hour news channels carry a range of programs during those normal, run-of-the-mill periods.

Luis Rivas: It is our task, it is our role to analyse everything that happens. We have experts on every country in the world prepared to make a quick analysis of something. I think on a 24-hour news channel we have to give the information and sometimes we have to take the time, if we have the elements, to make an analysis, but I think we are not able to do an analysis as the people are asking of us. Television and 24-hour news channels must give the information, share the information we have, with the pictures we have. I think another medium might be more adapted to analyse things that are happening.

Nula Safi ( Kuwait): My concern is that the media has to be responsible. You have to take responsibility for your actions. You are distorting the truth, and the consequences are long-term and it's costing many communities greatly. You are all stating: the truth, the truth - but at what cost? Distortion of the truth is what you're showing, but it's not the truth necessarily.

Rajdeep Sardesai (IBN, India): I'm with IBN, Indian Broadcast News, which is now tying up with CNN on one of 30 24-hour news channels in India. No other country in the world has as many news channels as we have. It depends on how you see the glass. If you see it as half-empty, you probably see a growing sense of normlessness, rules of privacy being abandoned, cameras being thrust into situations where they never would have been thrust five or 10 years ago. There is that side of 24-hour news. It is normless. The whole notion of breaking news has broken down. Anything in India that happens at the moment is breaking news, whether it's an earthquake or a small defection that takes place in the government.

Susan Ormiston: But is there a problem with that? Everything gets elevated to the same level of hysteria.

Rajdeep Sardesai: Everything gets dramatised, so it ceases to be news. It becomes news as entertainment. It trivialises the whole process of news, so when you really have a big story, you're not sure whether it's breaking news or not. I think you solve that with greater editorial control. The problem with 24-hour news is that it's difficult to control it on the editorial table in the manner that perhaps you could if you had just one news bulletin or if you had a newspaper, where you have time. You don't have the luxury of time to actually sift through news.

But you can easily see the glass also as half-full. In India 10 years ago, we just had government monopoly. Today you actually have broken down government monopoly, and television news has actually become enormously empowering. Every television channel wants to bring in viewer interactivity. Indian television viewers, who never saw their politicians for five years, between one election and the other, now see them in their drawing rooms, every day, day after day, being asked extremely tough questions. So there is a growing sense of empowerment.

We've had tragedies - we had the earthquake a month ago, we had the tsunami a year ago, and there was a sense of collective grief across the nation in a manner that never would have emerged in the pre-24-hour-news era. People actually saw this as a national tragedy in a manner that perhaps even the American networks would not have. My belief is that if 30 Americans had not died in Phuket, the question is whether the American networks would have taken the tsunami as seriously - it would have been just yet another South Asian tragedy. My problem with that is that at least I believe in India we've made it far more empowering than perhaps the international networks have made 24-hour news.