Dubai Festival of Literature: Kate Adie

I am delighted to find myself back in Dubai for the second literary festival, and to start the day with Kate Adie – a 'national treasure on loan to us for an hour', as Rosie Goldsmith (who introduced the session) charmingly put it.

Adie talks of her career as a frontline reporter with wit and warmth, modestly stating that journalism was something she 'fell into' rather than pursued. 'I come from a generation where all women were expected to do was a spot of light cooking and to have 2.3 children for England, and your destiny was sealed. Importuning strangers with impertinent questions was not something I was brought up to do.'

Prior to frontline reporting, she spent seven years in local radio, which she regarded as a formative experience. 'You learn that life is full of extraordinary people. Any group of people has within them the most amazing range of attitudes, knowledge – or lack of knowledge. There will be some who will be experts on anything from nuclear physics to chicken rearing, and some who will be positively deranged. Every group of individuals will have something interesting to tell you, if you know how to approach them the right way. In them there will be gold somewhere, which will fascinate you. There's no such thing as a totally dull group – apart from BBC management.'

Did she enjoy travelling to dangerous places? 'I like sandy beaches with a bar, but they tend not to be places where revolutions happen. People think war is terribly exciting, but they've just come from the movies. War is hell. It's tragic. The wrong people – the generous, the kind, the decent – get killed, and the thugs often survive.' As a frontline reporter, 'you don't go to take part in war, or to manage events. You are this little flea landing on a live body of events – you go to watch, and listen, and witness.'

Somewhat surprisingly, Adie is ambivalent about the rise of 24-hour news, which she sees as being driven more by a desire for novelty than for information. She also deplores the trend towards the 'show-bizzy' informality and trivialisation of news reporting. 'News is moving into the entertainment world – hi there! – and entertainment by its nature has to appeal, but news has to convey dreadful things.'

Her advice to young journalists? 'I'm boringly puritanical about journalism. If you want to be a journalist, you have to be fair, truthful and honest.' And, at the end of an interesting and insightful session, one can't help but wish that there were more boringly puritanical journalists about.