Blog Republic

Kevin Sites: the merging of blogging and journalism

by Darren

For sheer courage, it’s hard to argue with Kevin Sites’s plan to become a top notch journalist and blogger. You become a “conflict journalist”, touring the world’s hottest hotspots, and you chronicle it all in the HotZone. This brand of gonzo blogging journalism has done quite well for Kevin Site’s, with him winning the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. He’s also helped build an extremely popular blog community as well for Yahoo.

Does Kevin Sites represent the future of blogging? In some ways he does. He’s building a name for himself, expanding Yahoo’s online new media empire, and is enlightening readers who would otherwise be unfamiliar with the stories he’s presenting in a very intimate manner. Adding a blog to help journalize the tension in the HotZone and allowing users to comment expands people’s awareness of conflict in a very real sense. To me, he represents a best of breed concept that is something for anyone to strive for.

If you don’t have Kevin’s courage or journalist background (sadly I fear I lack both), you can still make a name for yourself using the same basic principles you can learn from his style of reporting. He puts himself into his new stories, and chronicles details that would otherwise be unavailable to the average news consumers. He’s bringing a unique twist to an old game. Since we can do the same without any bullets whizzing past our heads, it should be even easier for all of us to innovate. The bloggers who push the envelope and change how people consume media will be the big winners of Web 2.0.