One of the country’s biggest morning dailies used its digital resources to report a massive breaking story in its area.

The Eastern Daily Press, based in Norwich, covers the whole east Anglia coastal region.

But its night-time print deadline meant that the Friday morning edition last week could only report the preparations for the predicted mass floods which never quite materialised in southern England.

Reporters and photographers were dispatched along the coastline from King’s Lynn down to Lowestoft in the early hours of Friday morning to report back to HQ as the high winds and rising tides threatened major catastrophe.

One reporter was charged with co-ordinating all the copy as it came in and uploaded it to the paper’s website to keep readers informed of the ever-changing weather.

Deputy news editor Dick Watts said: “We put all our initial efforts into the website.

“Every three or four minutes we were updating it on Friday morning.

“Reporters were all out from 5am – it was a pretty early start but luckily we have an experienced team of reporters.

“Some had done this before and they are quite used to knowing where to go.

“One reporter could not get into a village because of floods but managed to get in through some of the back lanes and found where everyone had been evacuated to.

“We also had two reporters in Yarmouth where the storm could have flooded hundreds, maybe thousands, of houses.

“They had something like 14 evacuation centres.

“When we got the all clear in Yarmouth we knew we had a huge story.

“We could not get the news out in print so we got it out on the web.

“The web hits were an absolute record and Saturday morning we carried a front page and six inside pages with pictures from readers.”