LOS ANGELES Kevin Sites, the veteran war correspondent who provides dispatches from armed conflicts around the world for Yahoo! News, was announced Tuesday as this year's recipient of the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism.
Sites was chosen for his "style of work, the solitary commitment to truth, the selection of the newsworthy, the focus on the human faces, and the human fate," said Judea and Ruth Pearl, parents of the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002.
"As a journalist, few things are more gratifying than being recognized by your colleagues," Sites said in a statement. "They are the people who live this life, who best understand the sacrifices it requires, who sometimes endure the scorn but also know the rewards of telling stories that mean something."
"Daniel Pearl lived that life and paid the ultimate sacrifice for it," he said. "To be honored in his name will be a constant reminder to work to his standards everyday."
Sites is traveling alone to cover every major global conflict within one year for Yahoo's "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" feature. Calling himself a "SoJo," or solo journalist, Sites records, photographs, writes, edits and transmits his multimedia reports for the Web portal.
Previously, he spent five years covering wars and disasters for several television networks, including the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, U.S. anti-drug efforts in Colombia and the 2004 tsunami's devastation in Indonesia.
While covering the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq for CNN, Sites and several others were captured and briefly detained by Saddam Hussein's militia.
The Los Angeles Press Club will present the Pearl honor during its 2006 Southern California Journalism Awards on June 24 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel.
Past recipients include the late Michael Kelly of Atlantic Monthly, Time Magazine journalists Michael Weisskopf and James Nachtwey and Jesus Blancornelas, editor of the Mexican weekly Zeta.
The first award went to Pearl, who was researching a story on alleged links between al-Qaeda member Richard Reid the so-called shoe bomber and Islamic militants in Pakistan when he was kidnapped and killed.
