'I covered the Lindt Cafe siege as a radio newsreader. It changed the way I do my job.'

10 years ago this week, as the countdown to Christmas and the summer holidays was in full swing, a chocolate café in the heart of Sydney was held hostage by a man with a gun for 16 hours.

The Lindt Café siege in Martin Place, Sydney, in 2014, changed the face of our city, and thankfully a lot of police and government processes and laws in its wake.

What happened that day and night, isn't just etched into the memories of the hostages who survived. It also haunts their family members, particularly those of the two victims we lost, Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson.

LISTEN: The Lindt Café siege, 10 years on. Post continues after podcast.

In the years since, we've heard from one of the Tactical Operations Unit operatives, Ben Besant — the man who shot the terrorist dead, and who legally we've only been able to name in recent weeks — and former sniper Mark Davidson, who holds a lot of guilt for not shooting earlier. It's a day and night that continues to weigh heavily on them, too.

No doubt it also had an effect on the dozens of other police, paramedics, negotiators, psychologists and journalists who worked alongside and amongst the terror.

I was one of those journalists. I was only 23 at the time — a newsreader at 2GB, one of the biggest radio stations in the country, and one of the stations Man Haron Monis was relying on for updates while keeping his hostages contained.

I read the news every hour, on the hour, into the early hours of the morning as the siege ended in a blaze of gunfire and the deaths of both Monis and two of his remaining hostages.

Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson both died in the final minutes of the siege. Image: Facebook.

It's been a decade since that fateful night, and I still think about it often. In fact, it re-shaped the way I report on and approach breaking news.

I can still remember the team of producers around me fielding calls from the hostages themselves while Monis barked orders in the background. From the start, he'd wanted media attention, to be on the radio with the Prime Minister.

From the moment that first call came in until just after 2am in the morning when it finally ended, I had a police negotiator by my side as I wrote and read the news.

As the night wore on and the rest of my colleagues went home for the evening, it was just myself in the newsroom, my reporter who was on the ground in Martin Place, and a broadcaster and a handful of producers in the room next door. The negotiator would flit between the newsroom and the program studios keeping his ear across everything we did. Every time I heard a loud bang or Monis did something threatening, I was on the phone making sure my reporter was okay.

Thankfully, we didn't have to get as close as the TV guys who were within metres of danger, but it was their prerogative to get 'the shot'.

The police negotiator read my scripts and edited where he saw fit. "Can you remove this, and can you add that?" he'd ask, as we carefully planned out what messages we wanted to be heard within the café's walls.

Later I found out that we were still saying too much.

We didn't know that inside the café earlier in the afternoon, Monis only knew that three people had escaped.

"The media were reporting on the hour, every hour, that five people had escaped, so we had to calm him," survivor Louisa Hope told Mamamia's No Filter years later.

The media, myself included, also reported that the café was surrounded by heavily armed police. As Louisa explained to Mia Freedman, they were so thankful that Monis didn't hear that update, because who would have known what would have happened if he did?

There were many things that shouldn't have happened during the siege — with police handling of the terror event at the centre of an inquest that ultimately handed down 45 recommendations for change.

WATCH: Tori Johnson's mother slams police handling of Sydney siege.

Media coverage was part of that inquiry, with the Coroner finding that the police needed to seek an agreement with news media outlets to help establish a way for them to rapidly and confidentially determine whether publishing specific material could compromise the response to an ongoing high-risk situation.

The media were advised to alert senior police before publishing such material.

But that's easier said than done, especially when rolling news coverage of live breaking events reports in real-time what they're seeing and hearing.

The moment the siege ended in a shootout is one that will stay with me forever. I sat alone in the newsroom, watching it live on five different TV screens. There was no masking the bangs of light and the yells and screams as those final moments played out in living rooms across the world.

It was sometime before we learnt of Tori and Katrina's deaths and the several injured.

I can't speak for individual news organisations — what learning they took from their coverage over those 16 hours, or the coroner's recommendation. But personally, it changed the way I work.

It taught me the power of omission. How it could very well be life-saving.

As a young ambitious radio journalist, it taught me to stop thinking as a journalist and start thinking through the eyes of the victims. To put myself in their shoes and maintain that lens in everything I report. It's a rule I've tried to live by for the last 10 years.

Is this in the public's interest to know?

Will that detail or that particular story do more harm than good to those affected by it?

How can I tell this story without sensationalising it, or re-traumatising the victims?

I feel guilty for my part in reporting on news that could very well have put the hostage's lives in danger. It was a sobering realisation, as someone just starting out their career, of how powerful the media's role can be.

It taught me to question, always. Even with a police negotiator next to me. Even if everyone else is running with something.

It's a realisation that has made me a better journalist.

It's a lesson that has kept me focused on what's important — the people at the centre of the story.

Feature image: AAP/Seven News.