The hardest part about festive news planning is what happens if nothing happens

We plan for every eventuality over the Christmas period on the news desk, and we start early

At the end of October every year someone, like myself, calls the dreaded Christmas planning meeting. The usual suspects are summoned to embark on the arduous task: you know the sort, the ones who use Excel to do their monthly budget and then convert it into a personalised yearly financial forecast (complete with graphs).

Our festive planning at The Independent is no exception. The very same weather-worn ghosts of Christmases past gathered today in our conference room, to plot exactly how we would manage to continue our 24/7 coverage over the festive period.

Everything has to be accounted for. First comes the painstaking crafting of the much-feared Christmas rota, the stuff of which can cause an argument mid-July. But despite the faux outrage, we all know we will have to stomach at least a few graveyard shifts to make sure we are ready to respond to any situation. We know news can break at anytime, anywhere, and our audience trust us to be there to deliver it.

Last year it fell to me to edit the Daily Edition on Christmas Day, something I did from my family home in Devon. Technology now allows us to compile our journalism from all corners of the world, with the same vigour as though we were all together in one room. This change is something which has made working Christmas somewhat more pleasant than in years gone by.

This year, for instance, if you are reading The Independent from your living room on Boxing Day, elements of it will have been compiled by editors in Delhi, New York, Newcastle and London. Meanwhile, the journalism gathered to make the news could have come from any one of our correspondents across the globe from Istanbul to Brussels.

But it’s not just the rota which still requires meticulous attention to detail. We also need to plan our logistics – who will be where in case the unthinkable happens, for instance. We have to know exactly, down to the minute: we cannot leave any post unmanned.

We also need to plan for the unthinkable not happening – and this is actually the most difficult part. We have to make sure we have an array of interesting new features, investigations and exclusives planned, written and ready to use in the event of very little happening in the world to report upon.

So between now and then, spare a thought for the journalists at The Independent who will be working much like Santa’s elves, to dig for those much-needed, well-crafted extras to fill our editions over Christmas and New Year.

Yours,

Chloe Hubbard

Assistant Editor