Sydney, May 15 (AP): Kate Webb, a pioneering journalist whose powerful reputation was forged on the front lines of the Vietnam war and endured almost 35 years of reporting strife throughout Asia, has died, her family said. She was 64.

Webb, who once made the news instead of writing it in 1971 when she was captured in Cambodia and held prisoner by North Vietnamese troops, succumbed to bowel cancer in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday, her brother, Jeremy Webb, told The Associated Press on Monday.

``There wasn't a story that she ever covered poorly, but it was her war reporting that drove her and incidentally turned her into an icon of her generation,'' said Alan Dawson, a colleague of Webb's at news agency United Press International during the war years.

The New Zealand-born, Sydney-trained Webb first went to Vietnam in 1967 and spent more than six years covering the war for UPI, building a reputation for brave and honest reporting and insightful writing.

After the war's end, she worked throughout Asia for UPI and later Agence France Presse, following the news and covering some of the region's biggest stories from South Korea to Afghanistan and a half-dozen other countries, as well as Iraq during the first Gulf War.

After covering the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia in 1998, she retired from journalism in 2001, saying she felt ``too old to keep up with front line reporting, and that was the only kind I liked.''