Kevin Sites' Hot Zone Builds Audience
Posted on April 20, 2006
An AP article says journalist Kevin Sites started his Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone site on Yahoo so that he could "tell smaller stories about human lives." These human interest stories are very popular -- the AP says comScore puts Sites traffic at 500,000 to 1.4 million monthly users.
"Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" draws a monthly U.S. audience � Internet users visiting at least once that month � ranging from 500,000 to 1.4 million, according to comScore Media Metrix. (Some stories also appear in print through the Scripps Howard News Service.)The archives of the Kevin Sites blog can be found here. The article says Kevin Sites hires translators and fixers and has three full-time producers so he has production help. He also travel with several tech gadgets. The success of the Sites' Yahoo site shows that independent journalists may be able to go solo using today's technology and a small support staff.That's larger than the Internet's most popular Web journals and comparable to the entire Web sites of many metropolitan daily newspapers, but it's nowhere near broadcast outlets -- on the Web or over the air.
Consider NBC, which had retained Sites as a freelancer before he joined Yahoo last year. MSNBC.com typically gets at least 24 million visitors a month, while Nielsen Media Research says NBC's "Nightly News" averaged 8 million viewers last week -- that's for simultaneous viewers, not the once-a-month requirement for Internet tracking.
In fact, it was one of Sites' NBC dispatches that got him notoriety. He shot video of a Marine corporal shooting an apparently injured and unarmed Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque; the footage prompted outrage among Iraqis.
He later wrote about it on his blog and got attention that cemented in his mind the Internet's power.
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