They’re known as death knocks in the trade – and while I’ve never enjoyed doing them, I usually came back with an interview, because people often wanted to talk to someone about what had happened.

To knock on someone’s door after they’ve been bereaved is part and parcel of a journalist’s job. And before anyone clambers onto the moral high ground, there’s not one of us who hasn’t read a newspaper or consumed the news on TV or radio.

It is far easier for a newspaper reporter to do it than a radio reporter, because all he or she needs is a pencil and pad, whereas a radio reporter has to carry a microphone and recording device.

The hardest gig of all, and I know, is to do it as a TV reporter with camera operator and sound recordist in tow.

And more often than I care to think about, I spent days at a time when I was a jobbing journalist, at the scenes of incidents like the recent disappearance of Nicola Bulley in Lancashire. Necessary also.

The case made all sorts of headlines. Nicola’s phone was found, still connected to a work call, and her dog was in the locale too. A so-called underwater search expert pronounced that she was not in the area of the River Wyre he had examined, but her body was later found there.

When the police controversially revealed intimacies about her private life as the investigation continued, the mystery deepened.

It had everything a news desk would want.

Helensburgh Advertiser: Nicola Bulley, whose disappearance sparked huge media interestNicola Bulley, whose disappearance sparked huge media interest (Image: Lancashire Police)

And, concurrently, public speculation knew no bounds as the search for the 45-year-old mother approached a fourth week, with bizarre theories appearing, uncensored, on social media and members of the public arriving at the scene to take selfies.

It really was the perfect storm. But caught in the middle was a family in the agonising weeks-long limbo between hoping for a positive outcome and the closure of the discovery of a body.

J.K. Rowling tells of how a reporter once dropped his business card into her daughter’s schoolbag as she walked home one day, hoping for an overture. She quite rightly complained to the paper’s editor and the then authorities.

Today’s media have been pilloried for their conduct surrounding the Bulley case and Ofcom are involved. But if legitimate journalists take the fall for anonymous armchair online warriors, then that is a problem.

Having a free press is something we must cherish in this country and knocking on the door of someone at a bad time is not a crime. Cancel culture banning it, would be.