Newspaper editors, and senior executives, have looked at the lessons to be learnt from the reporting of disasters at the annual conference of the Society of Editors.

Marc Reeves, Editor-in-Chief of Trinity Newspapers Southern, talked movingly of his involvement in the Paddington rail crash.

Lecturer in PR at Leeds Metropolitan University, Shirley Harrison, shared her experience of dealing with the Hillsborough tragedy and the BBC's Fran Unsworth looked at the specific difficulties facing television crews.

Mike Granatt, Head of the Government Information and Communications Service, addressed the conference on how to deal with a crisis situation.

Most recently, he attempted to deal with the petrol crisis.

He talked about the importance of their central website.

He said: "It was kept very simple to allow the fastest downloading despite heavy use. It had a special address which was widely publicised alongside the call centre numbers. We also placed pages of material on national TV's teletext services.

"By the end of the crisis - in four days - the site took 600,000 hits, with an average visit of more than 10 minutes. The public call centre took 115,000 calls.

"The BBC Online news website took 7 million hits in the same period, and drew a lot of information from ours.

"We didn't have a plan for this crisis. Nobody had ever conceived anything of this sort.

"The closest we came to it was years ago, playing one of those Cold War games arranged by NATO. We needed to create a petrol shortage, so some bright scenario writer dreamed up a tanker drivers' convention in East Anglia which was wiped out by the Spetznaz.

"A website is now a key component of managing any crisis. But is has to be part of system. It must very flexible, well-edited, updated instantly whenever necessary. If it is to be any use at all, it must stay credible. It will be an integral part of our future arrangements, alongside a central call centre to direct people to information sources, such as teletext, local radio and TV, local papers, and, of course the website. It must contain links to every other useful site: e.g. all the news sites, central and local government sites, emergency service sites and company sites which are relevant."

Mr Granatt also said the crisis had showed them the power of the internet.

He pointed out that the combination of rumours running on e-mail, and a local radio announcer, caused major problems across the country as panic-buying took a grip just as supplies were starting to get back to garage forecourts.

"It was stark demonstration of the how fragile public confidence had become. And it showed yet again how essential it is to monitor what is going on and to move quickly to deal with rumours," he said.