Kevin Sites, the globetrotting multimedia journalist for Yahoo’s Hot Zone, regaled a crown of several dozen aspiring and practicing journalists last night at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He shared the lessons he learned about what media tool to use for whic task, the ethical and moral dilemmas he’s faced, and the hope he’s managed to find in a career dedicated to exploring inhumanity.

After Sites spoke for more than an hour, some Yahoo editors who were also on hand answered questions about the future of the Hot Zone now that Sites has completed his one-year assignment to report on war zones. And because the issue had to be raised, I confronted them with the complaints that Yahoo knuckled under to Chinese authorities by turning over evidence that landed a Chinese blogger in jail.

But sitting at the edge of the semicircle of folding chairs focused on this gorgeous and emotive guy, the story I want to tell is about Sites and the “I-feel-you-pain-journalism” that Hot Zone has built around this simple mantra — to find the story, find the victim.
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