DANIEL PEARL AWARD for courage and integrity in journalism Kevin Sites –On Site BY JILL STEWART T 43, YAHOO’S “Hot Zone” war corre- the roughly three-dozen armed conficts identifed spondent Kevin Sites has reported on, globally by the International Institute for Strategic and been the subject of, more contro- Studies. His most recent assignment, as of press versy than a typical war journalist expe- time, was in troubled Sri Lanka. Ariences during an entire career. The multi-media program Sites produces in- He is the recipient of the Daniel Pearl Award for cludes print reports, still photography, live video Courage and Integrity in Journalism, given by the and audio—all gathered using an ingenious array Los Angeles Press Club in consultation with Judea of technology stuffed into a single backpack. 14 and Ruth Pearl, parents of the Wall Street Journal His Los Angeles-based senior producer, Robert Kevin Sites records a 15 reporter assassinated by terrorists in Pakistan in Padavick, formerly of CNN and NBC News, says, “If standup from inside the remains of a building in 2002. he’d been in the Middle East or Africa, some place Grozny, Chechnya. Sites was tapped by Yahoo! last September closer to California, he would be there to receive to launch his news journal (http://hotzone.yahoo. the Daniel Pearl Award. But he couldn’t make it Some families too poor com), where he plans in a single year to cover all of from a remote place in Asia. This award for Kevin to aford houses on dry An old woman stands is just a huge honor, and it shows that we are on land live on their fshing in front of a funeral people’s minds.” boats on Dal Lake in pyre on the banks of While things have gone surprisingly well from Srinagar, Indian- Kathmandu’s Bagmati a technical standpoint, Padavick worries about controlled Kashmir. River. Sites’ safety—he was surrounded in the Sudan by “nerve-wracking anarchy.” Padavick does, however, Inset: During a rare see ample rewards in Sites’ coverage. The most dis- break in reporting, Kevin Sites conducts turbing was a piece on a child bride in Afghanistan, an interview from his given up at age four to a family who “tortured her an angry email from the unit I was with nor from for the sometimes-college lecturer raised in rural London hotel room for years,” Padavick says. She escaped, and Sites Marine battlefeld commanders who, though, sad- Geneva, Ohio, who got his start as a photographer with a journalism class discovered her in an orphanage transformed into “a dened by the incident, knew I reported with fair- at his town newspaper at age 15. Politically active in Texas. girl with so much poise beyond her years that Kevin ness and context.” after college (he holds a master’s degree from was foored.” After it ran, Sites received 16,000 His work continued to draw strong reaction Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism), he e-mails, and another 8,000 reactions appeared on as he reported from the Colombian drug wars, worked on Gary Hart’s presidential campaigns in Hot Zone’s comment board. Haitian slums, Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, the 1980’s, later worked for cable and local news, Sites has been a lightning rod for controversy Iranian religious communities in Tehran and grim and covered the Afghanistan war for the alterna- since he blazed into the public conscience in surgery wards on both sides of the Israeli-Palestin- tive weekly, The New Times of San Luis Obispo. November of 2004 after he videotaped a U.S. ian confict. As a CNN correspondent, he and his team Marine shooting an already-wounded Iraqi In a Jewish Review article in March, Sites said were captured while trying to be frst into vola- insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. Then an NBC public reaction to online reporting, including his tile Tikrit during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Threat- correspondent, Sites was eviscerated by some as own, tends to be “very vitriolic”—a response he ened with death by the Fedayeen militia controlled a traitor to U.S. troops, but praised by others as an welcomes for providing a “self-correcting mecha- by Saddam Hussein, the CNN team was released impartial journalist. nism,” but says can also discourage “reason and thanks to the efforts of a Kurdish translator travel- The embattled Sites later defended himself on dialogue.” ing with them. his blog, www.kevinsites.net, saying, “I never got The past four years have been a rocket ride Things have changed dramatically since his Photos by Kevin Sites DANIEL PEARL AWARD KEVIN SITES bosses at CNN ordered Sites to suspend his “war blog” three years ago, with a CNN spokesman ex- plaining to USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Re- view at the time, “We do not blog.” Last fall, Sites bucked tradition again, signing onto Hot Zone. At the time, Yahoo! said he would cover conficts “typically left uncovered or under-re- ported by mainstream news organizations.” The job came with an even more unusual four-part credo: “transparency” in his reporting process so online users can see him overcoming real-time problems in the feld; “vulnerability” as Sites experiences the same dangers to which his interview subjects are exposed; “empathy” as Sites pursues local sources regardless of what they believe; and “solutions” pro- vided to his readers, who are given online links to organizations working in war-torn areas. Few journalists could work under such non-tra- At the Red Security Museum in northern Iraq, housed in a former Iraqi intel- ditional conditions, but Sites has made a career of ligence facility of the same name, museum guide Hamid Ibrahim stands in front defying tradition. Today, he usually works without a of a display depicting the torture that occurred there. safety net, traveling solo and relying on high-defni- tion digital cameras and satellite modems to get his Twelve-year-old Gulsoma stories out—with help from Los Angeles producer lives in a Kabul orphanage. Padavick, associate producer Erin Green, formerly When her father died, her with C-SPAN and NBC, and researcher Lisa Liu, for- mother gave her away to a merly with Radio Free Asia. 16 new family in an arranged “Kevin was in the Sudan, in a very diffcult and marriage. Gulsoma was remote place, then after a short break he was head- just four. For years the ing to Fallujah, and he tells me, ‘Man I think I have family beat and tortured her, until Gulsoma fnally malaria. I have night sweats,’” Padavick recalls. escaped and made it to the “Before I could ask him if he was taking his medi- police with a neighbor’s cation he was saying, ‘I have my next story set up, help. Despite her horrifc tomorrow,’ and he was off and running. It reinforces past, Gulsoma displays the point that we are doing this without bureaus or strength and hope far contacts along the way.” beyond her years. Yahoo! describes the brand of journalism Sites is practicing as “a nexus of backpack journalism, narrative story-telling techniques, and the Internet.” Perhaps. But for millions of online users who have seen his work and images, both terrible and beautiful, the untraditional risk-taker Kevin Sites is practicing journalism in its most unfettered form. Kevin Sites interviews a Sudan People’s Liberation Army commander in Rumbek, south Sudan. A villager in the town of El Difcil, Colombia, where paramilitaries operating in the area recently laid down their arms..