Hi Simon and welcome to the RH community.
If your "2008 report" topic is a few lines, you could add a
glossary term and use the glossary wizard to create expanding text
entries but I guess this may not be relevant in this instance. If
so, then a link is the way to go but there is no way to create an
automatic link.
You could do a find and replace using a tool such as FAR or
BkReplacEm which work over multiple lines of HTML. Failing that,
why not create one link, select it in the WYSIWYG, go to the
truecode, copy the contents to the clipboard, create a Notepad
file, paste the code and save it. Then when you need to use the
link, just go the truecode and paste it in.