The graveyard shift is exciting when everything can change overnight

For a young journalist like myself, the night shift offers the rewarding opportunity to take responsibility and shape our coverage when news breaks in the early hours.

At its most basic, night editing the Daily Edition includes getting the front page signed off by the editor and making sure our articles are up to date when subscribers wake up to read them in the morning. Sometimes a story can move so quickly that you’ll have to replace the text altogether.

Should something major break late at night, we sometimes have to scrap the front page and start from scratch. It seems to happen in waves: with one particular colleague it felt like we were all hands to pump every time we were together on “the graveyard shift”.

Donald Trump delivered one of my most memorable nights, and kept me chasing the story well into the daylight hours. Things were calm. And then they weren’t. We got word that White House hacks had been called in for an announcement. The US had attacked a Syrian airbase controlled by Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Suddenly the adrenaline kicked in as we worked out a strategy for covering the story accurately.

Thankfully, our reporters in New York were on the ball, as they always are in these situations, and we combined forces to deliver reports and analysis that captured the mood in the US and delivered them to our UK readers. In times like these you really get to appreciate how committed The Independent’s journalists are to their work – to providing clarity amid the chaos.

Working through the night has its quiet moments of course, but you are always poised to burst into action when the drama unfolds. It is a crucial part of any news business that takes a 24-hour approach. Our readers expect nothing less.

Yours,

Zak Thomas

Sub-editor