Frank Gardner - What's the story?

The most important thing is to work out editorially what is the story? What are you going to tell people today? It might be the second, third, fourth day that we're doing it And sometimes I will say to the editor, I don't think there's anything new enough about this story today We're just doing it for the sake of doing it and so we don't do it Because that's just playing along for the sake of form. There's got to be something new to say, I work in news and that means exactly what it is It's got to be new. And often I will get a press release from somebody saying this is really interesting We wan't to tell you about this and I'm thinking, no it's not new I've read this before, I've heard this So there's got to be something new to tell Saudi special forces on a desert exercise this week close to the Iraqi border It's called northern thunder and brings together forces from 20 Islamic countries In terms of building blocks you need ideally some interviewees in it For television and for radio about 20 seconds, the soundbite is about 20 seconds So you want to be able to get someone into the studio ideally to comment on it So you get like a professor or a researcher or somebody who knows about the subject And you say look, tell us why we should care, why should we care about this story? And their 20 second sound bite will be something like 'well this is an important development 'because its the first time we've ever seen anybody doing this in the world stage and what does that mean? it means that such and such...' That's all you need, somebody to tell you why it matters I know it is exhausting and a matter of resources, a matter of people, today we face challenges in the south With our forces stretched in the north and deployed since 2014 This is why because we feel that our national security is in danger Often you need a piece to camera in there and that's a really important building block as well You know if you are out in the field, you need to be as close as you can safely get to where something has happened so that they can see you the reporter relating to the actual story This airbase in northern Saudi Arabia is currently playing host to a whole variety of war planes from different Muslim nations And it's the first test of the Saudi led Islamic coalition set up last year The Saudis tell us it's got two aims; to combat terrorism and to confront what they see as Iranian expansionism in the Middle East