News reporting is a matter of luck, veteran BBC reporter says
Kate Adie shares some of her experiences with audience
Dubai: There is always an "element of luck" involved when reporting news, according to veteran BBC reporter Kate Adie.
"My colleague Martin Bell always says never say ‘I've had enough of this'," Adie said of waiting for a breaking story. "Just hang on that extra hour, just grit your teeth and wait and it'll come to you'.
"I do believe there is an element of luck in journalism," she said at a session during the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature yesterday.
She added that luck does work both ways, however, as there was one journalist that always left or arrived just after or before the actual news event occurred, she said, being careful not to name the reporter in question.
Adie happened to have been called on to a shift early, as a junior reporter for the BBC, just in time for the SAS to storm the besieged Iranian Embassy in London, in 1980.
Contrary to popular belief, not all the reporting is done "from a bar in a hotel" Adie said.
An air of shock swept the audience when she spoke of reporting from the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
While reporting from the streets leading up to the square with her cameraman, two Chinese men standing next to them were shot dead.
