THE job of a web editor is rarely dull. Looking at tweets over breakfast might be the first thing I do to start the day, perhaps a little selfishly to see if there will be a clear run in to work.

Today proved even more eventful than some as a crash which closed the A361 at Bishops Cannings must have happened not long after I drove past.

Letting others know what was going on there became the first real task of the day and, fortunately, there weren’t any serious casualties.

Checking emails and Facebook messages is next on the agenda, and always keeps me on my toes.

I might have to remove inappropriate comments from a posting underneath a story or on Facebook, forward details of a potential story to a reporter or a contributed picture for a content editor to place on a letters’ page.

The day took a dramatic turn when we were sent photographs of a dozen police vehicles on the M4, north of Swindon, a reporter putting a call in to the Wiltshire Police HQ at Devizes to find out what was going on.

Incidents on the M4 can range from a lorry breaking down to a full-scale closure after a serious accident that can have knock-on effects for traffic across much of Wiltshire so it’s a priority to get something online, posted to Facebook and tweeted as soon as possible.

Pretty quickly it became clear that this was a major incident, a car having been followed by police from Taunton until a crash on the motorway just after junction 15.

As well as sending our photographer we were lucky enough to get other pictures from a professional photographer who happened to be in the area.

Links to the Somerset County Gazette - another Newsquest title - meant we were quickly able to use their picture from the Taunton crime scene and let them have some of our own pictures.

Updates from police and other emergency services meant the story needed updating frequently during the day, with Highways England finally saying traffic conditions were getting back to normal after 4pm.

It certainly grabbed people’s attention and the story had a total of 44,000 page views - the most for any online Newsquest story that day.

Of course, other things are going on all the time too.

Reporters are covering courts and councils, charity events and appeals, all stories which have to be uploaded onto the website, while our sports writers are also kept busy.

Flagging up what we do on social media is all part of the process of getting the message out there - reporters want their work to be seen by as many people as possible, and sharing and commenting online is all part of the process now.

It’s hard to believe that when I started out as a journalist in the 1980s copy was still being typed onto paper.

Some people might hanker for the good-old days but it was a real headache if if a bundle of copy didn’t make it through from a district office to where it needed to be set into hot-metal type.

Nowadays we take it for granted that pictures can be emailed but it wasn’t that long ago that negatives were and pictures had to be developed in darkrooms with masses of chemicals and paper involved, a process often taking hours.

The downside is that newspapers employ far fewer people these days but it’s been an exciting move into the digital world - and we’re still printing papers, of course.