A weekly paper was published two days early last week to break a major six-page exclusive into a woman whose body was exhumed.

The Exmouth Journal hit the streets on Tuesday rather than Thursday to break the story of Binny Day – when a police press conference revealed she had been a victim of sexual abuse before she committed suicide.

Chief reporter Becca Gliddon had been working on the background material to the case for more than two months before the rest of the media world was called to the press conference on Monday to hear about the major crime case.

And the Archant South West title decided to publish 48 hours early so its six-page investigation could be published at the same time as the national and regional media reported on it.

Editor Phil Griffin: “We knew the press conference material was going to be embargoed until the early hours of Tuesday, which meant we could be out with our special edition with material the rest of the media could only dream about.

“Becca left the rest of the media standing on a major story, which had the rest of the media scrambling about.”

Binny Day committed suicide 22 years ago by throwing herself 200 feet from cliffs at Budleigh.

But a police investigation into historic sex abuse in East Devon, nicknamed Operation Goodrich, recently resulted in the jailing of Binny’s brother, Tommy Dance, for child sex abuse.

The operation also threw up new evidence that Binny had been “sexually abused and violently raped over an extended period”, prompting a new investigation to find her abusers.

This led to police deciding to exhume her body to recover DNA samples from it in a bid to identify her offenders.

Becca’s reports included an exclusive interview with Binny’s closest friend and the scoop that not only had her brother been jailed for child sex abuse, but so too had her father – as had her son, only last month.

Journal editorial staff worked over the weekend to get the paper out two days early, supported by the advertising and distribution departments and Weston-super-Mare studio.

And chief photographer Simon Horn and his team spent hours taking still shots and then covered the exhumation, including creating a video for the website.

The Journal broke the story online at three minutes past midnight last Tuesday morning and kept the website updated with breaking news material – with page impressions up to 9,532 – compared to an average of 1,375 a day.