Jan 5: Talk – Mobile Media Practice in the Digital Age

Kevin Sites

The emergence of mobile (backpack) journalism is the story of how passion and necessity intersect. It’s about telling the story without changing it, reporting with less intrusion and more flexibility. The reporters’ footprints shrink, while the stories they tell become more authentic and powerful.

As Yahoo! News’ first journalist, veteran war correspondent Kevin Sites merged modern digital technology with narrative storytelling during his Hot Zone project and garnered international attention as one of the pioneers of backpack journalism, a course he now teaches at the University of Hong Kong.

Date: January 5, 2013 (Saturday)
Time: 2 – 4 p.m.
Venue: HKU Shanghai Study Centre, 1st Floor Lecture Hall, 298 North Suzhou Road (北苏州路298号) Hongkou District, Shanghai.
Language: English
Cost: Free. RSVP is required.

About the speaker:

Kevin Sites has spent the past decade reporting on global war and disaster for ABC, NBC, CNN, and Yahoo! News. In 2005, he became Yahoo!’s first correspondent and covered every major conflict in the world in a single year for his website, “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone.” The project helped inspire the use of “backpack journalism” as tool for immersive reporting.

Sites is a recipient of the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism and was chosen as a Harvard University Nieman Journalism Fellow in 2010. He is the author of two books for Harper Perennial, “In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars,” and “The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Can’t Tell You About What They’ve Seen Done or Failed to Do in War.”

He is currently an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

Please register via email JMSCSH@hku.hk to reserve a place.