Experiments in conflict reporting

Kevin Sites' next project with Yahoo! could be as much of an experiment as his first

By Arthur Rhodes
AsiaMedia Contributing Writer

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Santa Monica, California --- In many ways, Kevin Sites is right back where he started.

Late in the summer of 2004, Yahoo! News hired Sites to produce the Hot Zone -- the Internet giant's first and, so far, only major attempt at producing original news content. The project, a multimedia clearinghouse of conflict reporting, would be tailor-made for the decorated war correspondent; over the course of the next year, he would attempt to file stories, images and video from every active war zone in the world. He would travel alone and carry some of the most sophisticated equipment available for multimedia news production.

Reporting the news in multiple mediums is now the rule rather than the exception, so it is tough to remember that when Sites and Yahoo! first launched the Hot Zone, it was one of the most innovative responses yet to the changing face of international journalism.

For Sites, the Hot Zone was the opportunity of a lifetime. A network-news cameraman and award-winning blogger who began his career as a photographer for his hometown paper, Sites is one of the pioneers of the solo journalist model of reporting, in which one journalist does the job of an entire news crew. He had three producers at his home base in Yahoo!'s Santa Monica office, and fixers and translators along the way, but traveled by himself from the coup in Nepal and killing fields of Cambodia to the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

For Yahoo!, the Hot Zone was a business venture. Prior to funding Sites' ambitious project, the Yahoo! News page was one of the most trafficked places on the Web to read content from other newsrooms around the world. But starting a newsroom from scratch with an underdeveloped model of reporting presented its own set of unique challenges.

"Yahoo! has been aggregating news for so long, and they do a very good job of it… [but] it hasn't been easy in a lot ways because we had to teach Yahoo! what a newsroom was. Covering news in an original way, it was going to take some work to make sure everybody was on the same page," says Sites.

From the time Sites posted his first stories from Somalia in September 2005, the Hot Zone grew to have two million readers per month, according to Sites. It got the kind of readership that would appease most new editors, but Sites, who had hoped the Hot Zone would help stem what he sees as America's swelling "international illiteracy," wishes more of Yahoo!'s millions of visitors would have logged onto his site.

"I am disappointed that we weren't promoted a little more on Yahoo!," says Sites in a rare criticism of his employer. "The front page is a big piece of real estate. If we'd have gotten a little more front page space, we might have gotten a few more readers."

According Brian Nelson, a spokesman for Yahoo! News, this is not a unique complaint. "Every website at Yahoo! wishes they were getting more space on the front page," says Nelson in a telephone interview. He adds that since the Hot Zone began, Yahoo! has changed the way content is selected for promotion on the front page. The new system, he says, allows for more editorial control over which parts of Yahoo!'s network of sites get highlighted.

Though Sites is often called a pioneer for his work, he admits that the Hot Zone did not prove itself to be a "sustainable business model for Yahoo!." But Nelson says that success for the Hot Zone has to be gauged differently. "We knew from the outset that this was not going to be a big revenue generator for us. But it was a serious journalistic endeavor that provided a service to our consumers and was a boost to the Yahoo! brand."

For Yahoo!, the Hot Zone was an investment in what Nelson calls the "attention business." When Sites and Yahoo! launched the Hot Zone in September, 2005, Yahoo! News was running a neck and neck race with MSNBC to become the Internet's largest news provider. At the end of 2006, according to Internet information analysts comScore, Inc., Yahoo! News pulled ahead, garnering 31.4 million unique visitors per month compared to MSNBC's 25.9 million.

"Obviously you cannot attribute all of that [traffic growth] to Kevin Sites and the Hot Zone, but it is that kind of unique content which grabs and maintains the attention of our users," says Nelson.

Nelson says, aside from its millions of readers, there is another way to know that the Hot Zone was a success: its model is being studied and emulated by news organizations all over the world. According to the Yahoo! representative, many of the major organizations that aggregate their news content to Yahoo! -- he declined to say which organizations -- have approached Sites and the Hot Zone production staff for advice about how they might incorporate the Hot Zone reporting model into their own newsrooms.

Both Sites and Yahoo! are keeping quiet about what will come next, though both have made it clear that a project is in the works. Sites, who has been working on a documentary film (which will be screened in Los Angeles next week) and book about the Hot Zone, says he is ready to "get back out there" -- wherever "there" may be.

But for all of the Hot Zone's originality, after all of Sites' efforts as a pioneer (or as an astronaut as he is often called around the Yahoo! News room), the next Kevin-Sites-led Yahoo! News foray into original content will still be an experiment, and there is little guarantee that it will be a successful one. According to Sites, this is just the nature of the medium.

"I think we have to figure it out," says Sites. "Otherwise we end up in a situation where we cannot get funding for the kind of good journalism that people are coming to expect from this medium. I'm not sure what it will look like or what compromises we might have to make, but I am confident that we can do it."

Date Posted: 4/17/2007