7NEWS Spotlight team reveals late-night edits behind Pauline Hanson special

7NEWS Spotlight's Pauline Hanson special was still being reworked in the days before it went to air, with the program's team trading "3am emails" and "4am revisions" to settle the story's balance, according to the show's host.

Michael Usher made the comments during a panel at an industry trade event, hosted by 7NEWS Director of News and Current Affairs Ray Kuka alongside The Briefing host Sacha Barbour Gatt, on the topic of trust in modern journalism.

The Spotlight special, which examined the One Nation leader's popularity and political influence, became the most-watched current affairs program of the night, drawing a national total TV audience of 753,000 and reaching 1.35 million Australians.

READ MORE: ‘Hey, you’re the bloke on TV’: The day Michael Usher got punched on assignment

READ MORE: 7plus surges to #1 as FAST channels reshape free TV viewing

Getting Hanson's cooperation

Usher said convincing Hanson's camp to participate took months of negotiation across Australia and the UK.

"Pauline's camp are hard in that they have a very particular view of the media, but to get their trust to have that full cooperation, and a programme like Spotlight needs full engagement with the person you're going to do a story on," Usher said.

"You can't just say, look, give us half an hour at a time, do one interview. We are not going to get enough from that person for the audience to believe they learned the full picture of that subject."

"So negotiating with Pauline's people and Pauline directly to have that full access, which was in Australia, then in the UK, where she'd be listening to it, was very, very difficult," he said.

Right down to the wire

Usher said the program was not locked away once filming finished, with the edit still changing in the final week before broadcast.

"Right down into the final edit, and that was one of those stories that was still coming in during the course of last week; it wasn't just edited and locked away," he said.

"It was through midnight; it was 3am emails, 4am sort of revisions of edits: have we got the right balance in this."

Usher said the process drew input from well beyond the core production team.

"It was just a hell of a lot of debate and discussion. It really wasn't just one reporter, one producer, one editor, one panellist putting it together," he said.

"At one point there were ten of us, and everyone had a different point of view about what should go in it, and what should come out of it, and the context we needed to leave it in."

Why 7NEWS pursued the story

Kuka said the network felt an obligation to cover Hanson despite her divisive public profile.

"[Hanson] is not everyone's cup of tea, of course, but we take it seriously that as a news organisation we feel like we have to talk about topics that are going to affect society," he said.

"But if you watched that episode, it would have hopefully challenged you in your thinking and at least had a better understanding of why she may be popular, [or] why your neighbour might be liking her."

Kuka said the Spotlight team, including Usher, reviewed multiple cuts of the program before it was signed off.

"As a whole, the team at Spotlight, including Michael, watched cut after cut after cut to get it right," he said. “We wanted to make it balanced. We take this trust element, getting facts right, incredibly seriously.”