Kevin Sites off on a new blogging adventure?

This guy never sits still. I can't tell from the Yahoo! News release on this new arrangement if that means Sites is no longer linked to MSNBC, or if any of these new posts will have any connection to his existing weblog. On KevinSites.net, I read that that site has been dark since January, and its archives (why its archives?) will be moving over to the new site.

Link: Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone From Yahoo! News.

Meet Kevin Sites

One of the world's most respected war correspondents, Kevin Sites has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national TV networks. Now he joins Yahoo! News to provide a unique, multimedia perspective on some of the world's most troubled and dangerous places.

A solo journalist ("SoJo"), Sites will carry a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit daily reports from nearly every region of the world. You'll be able to follow his endeavor through stories, photos, video and audio, and you'll be able to interact with him.

Sites helped pioneer solo journalism, traveling and reporting without a crew. His past assignments have brought him to nearly every region of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe.

He has been nominated for a national Emmy award and honored with the Payne Award for ethics in journalism for both his television and Web coverage. Wired magazine named Sites as the recipient of their RAVE Award — the first ever for blogging.

Yahoo! News also takes some time to lay out the ethics and mission of the endeavor, and carefully defines "Hot Zone" as well, a kind of journalistic transparency you don't usually see, although many aspects of this project appear to be new for Yahoo! News.

Here's a bit of what the page says about "Hot Zones."

What are the "Hot Zones"?

We apply the standards of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London which monitors these conflicts around the world. The Institute is not affiliated with any government and is a leading authority on political-military conflict.

It defines armed conflict as:   

1. "International armed border and territorial conflict involving governments."
2. "Internal armed conflicts taking place between government forces and organized
   groups, which control sufficient territory to sustain concerted
   military operations."

To this we've added our own criteria:   

1. The conflict must have been active within the past three months.
2. We will cover issues relating to terrorism and the war on terror. We will
   not focus on acts of terrorism, which are random and borderless.
3. We will make exceptions if a location does not fit these criteria but we
   feel it important to highlight the conflict-related issues it has
   experienced.

It says he'll be going on a "yearlong journey" to cover every armed conflict in the world. A number of countries are listed, and another "watch list" of countries could end up on the schedule, I guess. Algeria is at the top of the Watch List, supposedly the most dangerous place on earth for journalists to go. As much as I'm living vicariously through Sites, I think I'd draw the line at Algeria. There's an international web site, not Doctors Without Borders, but a journalism site like that organization, it monitors the number of journalists killed covering stories from year to year, and it lists the most dangerous places for journalists to go. Algeria has topped that list for many years running. Where did I see that site? I can't remember, but now it's gonna bug me until I find it.

Aha! I found it, or at least one of the sites. It's been a few years since I last looked at it (and I've got a memory of a site with a light green background in my head, so maybe there's another place too, like this one). It's the Committee to Protect Journalists, www.cpj.org, that lists the ten year statistics of journalists killed while working in the field.

Iraq is now the most dangerous, with 38 journalists killed from 1995 to 2004 (35 have already been killed worldwide in 2005). Algeria is as I remember it, second with 33. The listing calls them the "deadliest countries," but the top two aren't really descriptive. Iraq is a war zone, and it is technically under U.S. occupation.

So if it is very dangerous in a war zone, and perhaps even in the so-called "Green Zone" in Iraq, that still doesn't seem as wooly as Algeria, where there's nowhere to run in country if you get in a tight spot. No areas secured by U.S. forces.

Nope, Algeria, bad. Don't go there, dude. Colombia and Russia come in next in line, but again, there's a U.S. presence in those places.