Regarding the term round-up. "Round-up" in journalism has varying shades of meaning. But usually it's a current, breaking story, running all week, and then in say Saturday or Sunday's papers, there's a "round-up", or summary, of all the elements of the story, and a fresh look at the topic now that a lot more information and opinion has emerged during the past few days.

So a round-up is really a gathering-in. Think of a stockman riding the paddocks at the end of the week, bringing all the scattered cattle into one yard. You ride back over the week's reporting, collect the facts that are now confirmed, drop the rumours that did not stand up, and pen it all in one place for the reader who did not follow every twist.

The word has a few other uses you will meet. A "news round-up" or "sports round-up" simply means a single piece that gathers many small separate items, the weekend's match results, say, into one tidy report. A "round-up of reaction" pulls together what a dozen different people said about one event. In every case the idea is the same: many threads, gathered into one.

The skill in a round-up is shape. You are not just dumping everything you have in a heap. You lead with what matters most now, you remind the reader briefly of how we got here, and then you point forward to what happens next. Done well, a round-up is one of the most useful things in the paper, because it hands a busy reader the whole story in a single sitting.