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From the front line

Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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WHEN KATE ADIE speaks, she does so with laser-guided precision. 'I'm going to talk for one more minute,' she announces to the audience at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, before launching into a detailed treatise on the absurdities of 24-hour news. Precisely 59 seconds later she's finished.

Timing is everything for the reporter who has spent most of the past 24 years on the front line of some of the world's biggest stories. When she covered the Armenian earthquake in 1988, it took five days to get the pictures out. When the same fault line ruptured in last year's Iranian earthquake in Bam, it took less than four minutes to do the same.

Satellite technology has put an end to the maverick days when reporters such as Adie and their cameramen would risk bullets and grenades for the sake of producing a two-minute bulletin. And according to Adie, this isn't necessarily a good thing. 'Take the last Gulf war,' she shrugs in those familiar, rather posh tones. 'You'd have a reporter covered in dust, standing next to a transport, shouting, 'I've been on the road for the past five days. And there's been a lot of firing!' Yes? But do you have any news?'

It's a far cry from the days when people joked that the British Army couldn't start a war until Kate Adie had arrived. The BBC's chief news correspondent from 1989 to 2003, her face and voice are intimately bound with the major conflicts, triumphs and tragedies of that period. Yet she didn't stick around after the BBC declined to send her to the Iraq war last year: instead she retired after 35 years, and announced her intention to freelance.

'Today's reporter is reserved for the role of presenting information, which is coming from a laptop thanks to satellite feeds from London and New York. At least with radio you're forced to take a microphone to the story,' continues a woman who has brought some of humanity's darkest moments into the living room. She has ventured deep into the most notorious trouble spots of our time, including Libya, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Kuwait; she reported on the tragedies of Lockerbie, and from the smouldering remains of the World Trade Centre. She kicked her way through policemen in Tiananmen Square in order to get her footage out of the country. She has been shot three times; her left ankle is held together with pins.

An extraordinary portfolio, especially for someone who never intended to become a reporter. 'It's something I completely fell into,' she says during an earlier interview at the Mandarin Oriental, where she is relaxed, sun-kissed and elegantly dressed in a white jacket and trousers. 'I assumed I'd follow the old pattern of marrying, having children and becoming a housewife.' Adie, at 58, remains childless and unmarried.

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