Some phone calls you never forget. I was a very junior freelance, covering the radio late shift at BBC Aberdeen, when the Glasgow desk called. They wanted me to check a report of a fire on a North Sea platform.

The coastguard was busy, and Grampian police had few details. But yes, there was an emergency, and yes, it was a platform.

Until that moment I had never heard of Piper Alpha. But on the night of July 6, 1988, the Occidental installation 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen became the focus of world news in the worst possible way.

Twenty years on, the death of 167 men that summer's night is still the world's worst offshore disaster.

In the next week or so, hours of television and radio and page upon page of newsprint and websites will be dedicated to marking its anniversary, re-asking the questions it raised and re-establishing the facts.

Once again, the families of those who died and those who survived will endure the trauma.

Much of that coverage will take place on media outlets which did not exist when the disaster they recount touched peoples' lives.

In 1988 the horror of Piper Alpha was not played out on 24-hour rolling news on our TV screens. There were no newspaper websites with real-time updates and internet news blogs did not exist.

How would the way we cover news now have affected events then? Would the pace of modern news increase the pressure for information and lead to getting quicker answers to important questions? Or would we simply feed the 24-hour appetite for the new with speculation and unconfirmed scraps of information?

By the morning after the disaster the world's media had descended on Aberdeen.

But there were no live links to reporters on location, no satellite phones or trucks, no on-the-spot live interviews; none of the furniture of contemporary broadcast news.

Atholl Duncan, now head of news and current affairs at BBC Scotland, was among the team of BBC news staff sent to Aberdeen to cover the event.

"The first report I remember seeing was an interview with Jane Franchi on Newsnight, and it was done on the telephone," said Duncan.

"The next was on the breakfast news, and on scheduled bulletins, and if I remember rightly it was at six o'clock the following evening that the full story was relayed on TV."

He remembers the quality of journalism as being outstanding, but he is in no doubt that the pace and impact of modern coverage would have made a difference.

"The technology we have now does not inhibit our journalism. We are able to put the right people on the spot in a way that we were not able to 20 years ago."

As an example he cites rig owner Occidental's Dr Armand Hammer flying into Aberdeen and holding a brief press conference at the Exhibition and Conference Centre.

"Occidental would probably have to behave in a different way now," said Duncan.

"With the pressure of 24-hour news they would not have been able to hide the way they did. The volume of news now allows a far greater scrutiny of all areas of a story.

"And with Piper Alpha being owned by an American company, the whole story would gone global instantly."

That view is shared by Donald John Macdonald, now editor of STV North. In 1988 the then reporter was woken in the early hours of July 7 by the helicopters carrying survivors to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

"Armand Hammer would have been under enormous pressure to do one-to-one interviews with all the media outlets," he said.

A major issue for television coverage that night was the lack of pictures. Only one crew was there, by chance, on board a helicopter filming a documentary for STV.

Their film had to be landed in Lossiemouth and driven to Glasgow by then head of news David Scott to be developed, more than 18 hours after the event. With modern equipment the helicopter could even have landed on the standby vessel Tharos and sent the pictures by satellite in minutes.

The different timescale did nothing to lessen the impact of images which, even two decades later, STV has had to treat with special sensitivity in its documentary marking the anniversary of the disaster.

Eric Crockart, the BBC radio reporter on the scene, spent much of the night of the disaster doing live interviews for the BBC World Service and BBC stations across the world.

He does not see the phenomenon of rolling TV news as an improvement.

"There comes a point where you have reported all the ascertainable facts and you have to do something else," he said.

"The danger then is that you use speculation, which is not necessarily helpful or correct."

Arguably the medium that has moved furthest in the past 20 years is print. Newspapers no longer have to wait for morning or evening editions, and real-time websites often allow them to stay with, and often ahead of their broadcast rivals.

But Herald correspondent Graeme Smith, who covered the Piper Alpha story, believes that would not have been helpful in July 1988.

"I think non-stop news media can make it much more difficult to make sure that a story is reported accurately," he said.

"You often have websites or 24-hour news using unconfirmed things that turn out to be wrong. But the public think it's accurate, and you then have to work backwards to explain the correct situation."

Twenty years ago the news of Piper Alpha was less immediately accessible, but perhaps it was more considered, and for some more accurate.

Kate Graham was at the centre of the media storm in 1988, when she was Occidental's press officer. She is no doubt that the pressures of today's media would have made her task, and the trauma of those involved, much worse.

"It was constant then, but the press had a job to do, and they were understanding when we said that we couldn't comment on speculation or the comments of others," she said. She doubts whether she would get the same level of understanding today.

But while there may be disagreement about whether the current approach would have helped or hindered in the immediate aftermath of Piper Alpha, there is no disagreement on the scale of the impact of Scotland's worst industrial disaster of modern times.

In the intervening 20 years all of those involved in the coverage have moved on in ways that those more directly affected have not been able to do. But in the memories of the reporters, the limitations of 1980s technology and slower pace of coverage then did nothing to limit the scale of the task they were required to face.