Susan Ormiston: You say it's hard to control 24-hour news on the editorial table. How are you going to do it differently?

Rajdeep Sardesai: We're going to try and do it differently by just having better people. The bottom line is: 24-hour news for CNN is 25 years. For India, it's just seven to eight years. Most of the people who are so-called respected anchors are 28 and 30. In fact, it has almost become a limitation to have any grey hair. It's an extremely new, young medium and that perhaps creates its own problems. I think with time you will create specialist people. We're getting people now who are coming from print, people who have also gone through the process of actually reporting situations - that's the only way. We are a functioning anarchy in India, so 24-hour news in India will at some stage reflect the functioning anarchy that we are, with its positives and its negatives.

Susan Ormiston: Good luck! I want to turn to something completely different, perhaps because it's something that a lot of you are trying to think about right now as programmers. How do we deal with the avian flu pandemic that seems to be at our doorstep? How do we avoid hyping that, exaggerating that? Audiences tell me that they've already seen enough of "it's coming, it's coming." I want to show you a video that was produced by CBC. It's actually not a 24/7 program but it conceivably could be airing on the channel. It's ?essentially a "what if?" - a look at, what if the pandemic hits, what will happen? It's based on extensive research. This is the promo material for The Next Pandemic.

[Videotape]

Susan Ormiston: That will be an hour-long program airing on CBC in a month or so. How do we responsibly program this story?

Heaton Dyer: Inevitably this is a tough one. You've just seen the rather dramatic promo for a story we're treating very responsibly, not wanting to cause any hysteria. For Canada, we've gone through SARS, so we do have a bit of experience with this, and we have experience in particular with distortion. The issue for Toronto in particular was a distorted global image of what was really going on in the city, and the city and the country felt the consequences of this.

Nonetheless, the reality is with the avian flu, this is a story that we're on to. We're internally trying to figure out what are the best means of covering it, with context. We have a dedicated health team - we're enhancing the resources there and giving people the mandate to look at the information as it's coming in on a daily basis, and determine: Is it significant? Is it information that we should share with the audience? But there's no question that it is front of mind in terms of the sense that we may wake up soon and start to see a really significant daily story. This is not a story that comes in a neat package but it is a story that we feel is going to dominate our news agenda in the months to come.

Rodney Pinder (director, International News Safety Institute): Are any news organisations giving thought to the safety of their news crews and their newsroom teams if there is a pandemic? As we've heard on this promo, broadcasters urging people to stay at home and not go to work. How are you going to run your news organisations and what sort of protection are you going to give news crews who are being sent out on assignment? What if a news crew says: “Well, I'm not going to this hospital, because I'm going to die if I cover this story”? Any contingency planning for this?

Tony Burman (editor-in-chief, CBC News): Certainly for the CBC, the answer is yes, there is serious contingency planning being done as we speak. Part of the catalyst in Canada is SARS, not only as it related to Toronto and Canada, but also as it related the journalists who were covering that story. We're looking at different scenarios - one, for example, would be that we would have a limited work force that would actually be at work. Our priority right now is to get the vaccine to our international bureaus - for obvious reasons, because of the origin of the story. Also, it's quite likely that the situation in Canada in terms of vaccine would be far better than in the places where our journalists will be working. We're going down a checklist, but I think it's really quite serious right now.

Heaton Dyer: Bill Ralston, who's the head of news and current affairs at TVNZ, might have something to offer on this. Last night he was telling me that TVNZ has quite a significant plan. He was also saying there's a flock of birds heading toward New Zealand that is causing near panic in the population right now.

Bill Ralston (TVNZ): That has been an ongoing discussion in our newsroom - not only about protecting the news crews, but the more fundamental things, like air-conditioning systems, which you actually need in the studios. But do you really want germ-laden air-conditioning running through your newsrooms?

The other difficulty we're facing is being declared almost an essential service as a public broadcaster during a period like that. We're having a discussion with our government, and I know John Cameron at the Australian ABC has had a very similar discussion with the Australian government, and they're not accepting the ABC as an essential service, so it makes life doubly difficult.

Susan Ormiston: I do want to get back to the idea of the hyping of the story. Have we already committed that offence? I woke up one morning and heard on radio that we were doing a story about whether people should come to work, and I thought: For me, as a listener, that's too early. I don't need to know that information yet.

Nick Wrenn (CNN): I think it has been important for us to keep on telling our audiences exactly what this is and in simple terms. For the moment, for most parts of the world, certainly in Europe where I am, if you've got a beak and two wings this is very bad news. But at the moment, if you're a human, don't panic. And while it's an important health story, just explaining what the strain means, what the letters mean, and exactly what bird flu is and keep on repeating that, to make sure the audience doesn't make that jump itself.

Helen Boaden: We've been doing that too, but you have to remember that the most senior health officials in Britain have been talking about this, not in overstated ways - but Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, was talking about not "if" we have a flu pandemic - and it may not be bird flu - but "when" we have a flu pandemic because these things are a natural cycle and we're due for one. And he's talking - this is on the record - of 50,000 minimum dying. So it's not necessarily about us hyping, though we have had some glorious headlines in newspapers in Britain - The Ducks of Death Arrive was probably not the most helpful of headlines, but that's just our glorious tabloid tradition.

The thing that's really interested me is the extent to which our audiences have sought really in-depth information, probably taken there partly by our television and radio outlets on the Internet. When Liam Donaldson updated his health advice, and that's a pretty dry document, we published it on our website and we had 150,000 downloads in a morning. That's pretty significant, for something that's a technical document. There's fantastic interest in just getting an understanding of the facts as we know them at the moment, even though, as you say, beak and wings is really the thing to be worried about.

Wen Guang Shao (managing director, Phoenix Television, Hong Kong): With regard to bird flu, our focus, reporting out of China, basically is to focus on government pronouncements, because back in 2003 there was a twist and turn in events and the government tried to cover [SARS up], and some officials were sacked and eventually the truth came out. But Phoenix was the first to report on the SARS epidemic. This time around, it seems to me the government is trying to get the higher ground first by coming out very clearly about the danger and so on.

On the other hand, the Chinese, because they use chicken, because they use birds all the time for food, we always are very cautious about the way that we report it - but not too cautious. We are probably much better than a lot of other Chinese television stations, because we are Hong Kong television. But we also try to cover the event in such a way that would answer the questions not only for mainland Chinese, but also for Hong Kong and Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

Susan Ormiston: We want to talk briefly about "immediate journalism" - how telling is it when somebody is airlifted into a spot, stands on a rooftop, has to file four times in the half hour to four different services and can spend very little time newsgathering. So it's really from the reporting end of it.

Tim Marshall (foreign affairs editor, Sky News): Martin Bell of the BBC was, I think, the guy who invented the term "rooftop reporting." I think all of us have an enormous amount of admiration for Martin, but I think he was wrong then and I think he's wrong now. I think it's a bit of a myth, because what happens is two things, if you've got the money - and here's the key. You do send one reporter in, and they are what we call the "dish monkey" - tie them to the dish and they perform. I am a dish monkey on occasion. But we also send a second reporter, and they get out there and they newsgather.

As for: “What do I know, just standing on the roof?” - well, this is why they pay me. Let's take as an example Afghanistan, the war. It took us five days to get to the location we eventually settled on. We'd been through this, that and the other to get there. The B-52s were overhead, and we could report what we saw, even if we had to do it four times an hour - and you bring with you to that rooftop or that balcony all the knowledge that you've got. And so when somebody does say something into your ear, you use that bit of information, which you build upon the foundation of your knowledge.