Bryan BeilkeIt stood out in Borders.
Typically there’s not a small presentation and audience layout akin to the checkout counter at the Madonna Road bookstore.
Approximately 15 black chairs sat facing the table cloaked in a red Borders cloth adorned with books of “In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars” by Kevin Sites, an NBC News correspondent and former Cal Poly lecturer, on either side.
Sites was at the bookstore last Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. for a book signing event.
“This whole book is based on the project that I did when I was reporting for a Web site called The Hot Zone (hotzone.yahoo.com). It was about covering every conflict zone in the world for one year,” Sites said.
The charismatic speaker brought his chair out from behind the table to be closer with the audience. The proximity was short-lived. He soon returned behind the table to access his computer to read a chapter from his book.
During the two-hour signing, reading and discussion, Sites recognized people in the audience he knew from his previous time spent in San Luis Obispo.
He addressed his involvement in the 2004 controversial story during the Iraqi War. As an NBC News correspondent, Sites videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. When it aired, Sites was both accoladed as a forthright journalist and berated as a traitor to the Marine unit in which he was embedded as well as to his country.
Though the embroilment brought negative feedback, it also showed Sites the power of the Internet. He estimated he received 300 e-mails per day of praise, threats and criticism. Sites posted an online blog to respond.
“That controversy moved me into reporting online. It changed my career. … As a journalist, our job is to report the truth, minimize the harm and report it accurately. The chips are going to fall where they’re going to fall,” Sites said.
Sites is a solo journalist, or “SoJo,” a reporter who uses digital technology to shoot, write, edit, record audio and visual material, and transmit multimedia reports from conflict areas. Previous assignments have taken him to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South America and Eastern Europe.
Sites has worked in local, cable and network news. As a producer for NBC News, Sites received the Edward R. Murrow Award for coverage of the war in Kosovo.
When hired as a non-embedded correspondent for CNN, Sites reported from the front lines of Northern Iraq. The job was cut short when Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen militia outside of Tikrit captured him and his team. They were stripped of all their equipment, held hostage for four hours and threatened with death until their Kurdish translator negotiated their release.
Sites spent nearly six months on the front lines of Afghanistan for NBC and MSNBC News, reporting on the Northern and Eastern Alliance forces prior to and following the fall of the Taliban.
He has covered U.S. anti-drug efforts in Colombia. Sites has reported on cocoa spraying operations and the training of the Colombian government’s Jungle Commandos.
Regardless of the accomplishments he has achieved, the numerous regions he has seen and the plethora of human stories he has chronicled, Sites has maintained anamnesis for them all.
“There are people associated with all these places for me so I always remember that. I think about them daily. When I read the news, I see people there, I see faces, people that I knew,” Sites said.
Sites said part of his transformation into becoming an online reporter as a solo journalist was due to his time at Cal Poly. After taking a two-year sabbatical from NBC he started teaching at Cal Poly in the broadcast department.
“It was a mess,” he said. “They didn’t have any equipment. I went to the dean and I said to him, ‘Give me $10,000; let me buy 10 consumer-level digital cameras.’ Then I went to Apple and got them to donate computers. The problem was, I didn’t know how to do that stuff myself. I was working with crews as a producer. … I hadn’t shot and edited that much so I had to teach myself how to use this gear first and then teach my students.
“When my sabbatical was over, 9/11 happened and I went back to work for NBC, but now I knew how to shoot and edit due to my time at Cal Poly,” he said. “I ended up going out shooting and editing for (NBC) even though I was a producer. They liked what I did and made me a correspondent and sent me out to more wars.”
Peggy Jones, sales manager at Borders, said, “Authors approach our coordinator to set up an event like this and I believe (Sites) did so because he taught here and has connections here. The store has been here for five years and things like this really help us grow in the community. It went very well.”
Mary Power-Hall, 53, a San Luis Obispo resident and a follower of Sites’ blog, said, “His discussion was fascinating. I really like his human bend on all of it, like he’s reporting from the ground up. So many journalists have a political overview bend on it.”
Sites spoke about what he has learned about others through his coverage of wars worldwide.
“If you can’t feel emotion about this work, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Part of the reason I do it is because I’m so emotional about it. I don’t want that emotion to prevent me from doing it either, though, when I’m covering someone’s suffering or misery or triumph,” he said.
“It’s my job to be professional and not show them that because I need to honor what they’re going through. You can’t have a reporter crying when someone’s lost their child because that’s their loss and you’re there to humbly observe it, but not to take away from it because then they have to be strong for you. That’s not the job. The job is to be strong for them and report their story. I take a lot of that emotion with me and certainly respect it and feel it, too,” Sites said.
Sites is currently Yahoo’s first news correspondent and is working on the program People of the Web (potw.news.yahoo.com).
“I want to be relevant; I want the work that I’ve done to be relevant. … These people deserve to have their stories told and I was, in a lot of cases, the only one telling it. That’s a huge responsibility and a huge privilege. So being relevant as a journalist is my career goal. That’s what I like to do, tell stories that mean something to people, that potentially have solutions.”