More TV journalists can go solo into danger zones

Bob Arnot and Kevin Sites came to television journalism by very different routes and they work for rival cable networks, but they stand today as similar prototypes of the 21st century combat correspondent.

Arnot, 54, worked as a doctor until he became a medical reporter for CBS in 1981. He moved from CBS to NBC in 1997 and is now the chief foreign correspondent for MSNBC.

Sites, 40, has been a television reporter for virtually his entire career, first in local news in Florida and Los Angeles, and then in network news -- for ABC and NBC -- before taking a sabbatical in 1999 to spend two years as a broadcast lecturer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He’s now a foreign correspondent for CNN. Arnot and Sites are not just foreign correspondents. They are what is known in the trade as one-man bands -- or what Sites calls “sojos” (solo journalists).

Thanks to the small equipment made possible by laptop computers and digital technology (and to their mastery of the widely varying skills required to simultaneously practice journalism and use that technology), both can now go to a remote location and report a story, write it, videotape it, edit it and transmit it, at the scene -- alone.

Compact and mobile

Though many local TV news operations have long had to operate this way on certain stories, if only to save money, networks have traditionally used a reporter, producer, camera person and engineer or sound person (and maybe a lighting specialist as well) to produce a story.

But in combat situations like those that U.S. troops faced in Afghanistan and seem likely to face in Iraq, it can be not only expensive but also logistically difficult, if not impossible, to get a traditional television team on the scene.

“The Marines might not take you in with a four-man crew and all that big equipment,” Arnot said recently by telephone from Dubai, where he was on assignment before joining the Marines on an amphibious exercise off Bahrain. “It’s not practical. It’s too unwieldy. There’s no room. It makes things more dangerous for everyone.

“But digital technology makes you hyper-mobile. You can go basically anywhere on the planet and do the story and edit it on your laptop as if you were in a cutting room back home and put it on the air.”

Arnot did this last year in Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, among other places, and he says it makes for a “more personal form of journalism because you’re intimately involved with the entire process, and your subjects aren’t overwhelmed by all that big equipment and all those people hovering over them.

“When I was in Afghanistan with a charitable organization, World Vision, it was so low-key it was like I was part of their group,” he says. “I was able to interview and tape families actually selling their little girls -- girls 8 and 11 years old -- to be wives to 40-year-old men, so they could raise money to feed the rest of the family.”

Steve Hyvonen, executive producer for MSNBC, calls one-man bands “the reporting of the future.... You’d be left behind if you didn’t have a couple of one-man news-gathering reporters, especially in a region like [Iraq].”

Grittiness favored

Not surprisingly, the footage provided by one-man bands using video and satellite phone technology is not as polished as that available on the commercial networks.

When Sites was in Colombia late last month, he got an interview with journalist Robert Pelton and two colleagues just after they were released by their paramilitary kidnappers. The video was grainy and fuzzy. But it was exclusive.

Technology isn’t the only problem, of course.

“I’ll never be as good a shooter or editor as someone who’s done it his entire career,” Sites says. “But I’ve been working to improve my skills in all these areas, and the applications I learned and used during my two years of teaching made it possible for me to do it in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

Besides, Sites says, the less-than-perfect quality of his video isn’t always a disadvantage.

“CNN told me they want me to provide gritty, ground-view coverage, even if it doesn’t have the production values the networks require,” he says. “What I do isn’t a ‘Prime Time Live’ or ‘Dateline [NBC]’ kind of interview, with six sets of lights and filters and everything. My job is to take my mini-DV [digital video] camera and get as close to the action as I possibly can to show our viewers what’s really going on.”

Live coverage tricky

Arnot, Sites and a few other one-man bands are probably most effective when they don’t have to do their stories live but can send them by laptop, via the Internet, for subsequent airing.

“You can do it live, but the videophone gear you use for that is still a primitive technology, and that makes it awkward,” Arnot says.

The videophone functions as a sort of intermediary device between the camera and the satellite phone, processing the audio and video images for transmission and, Arnot says, “it’s easier if you have an engineer to operate the videophone.”

Still, Arnot’s MSNBC colleague Preston Mendenhall did live, one-man band coverage early this month from Syria, and, given competitive pressures, the temptation to use one-man bands for live stories in Iraq figures to be substantial.

“The imperative of the job means if you can do it, you’re going to do it -- get into the area where the combat is,” says Steven Livingston, a political scientist in the school of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington. “Competition encourages risk-taking, and modern technology facilitates risk-taking.”

CNN has six or eight correspondents capable of working as one-man bands -- veteran correspondents Nic Robertson and Gary Strieker among them -- and executives in Atlanta regard them as “a special breed of people, trailblazers who add a special dimension to what we do ... reporting you just wouldn’t get any other way,” says Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN.

“In wartime situations, we don’t put people out there alone,” Jordan says. “When we get Kevin out there [in Iraq], he will have company, even if for no other reason than to keep him safe.”

But, Jordan added, “I won’t say we’ll never send someone alone. We’d just prefer not to.”

Arnot says his MSNBC bosses have “told me repeatedly to be careful. They know I have a reputation for being on the edge. But I think you have the best chance of surviving if you go with the best, most elite troops, even if they go into the most intense combat.”

He pauses.

“I’m interested in the humanitarian side of foreign reporting, so I often go in with humanitarian organizations, and I think they have a high level of safety. But MSNBC told me I should call them first and go over things before I go into a potentially dangerous situation.

“That’s what I’ve done.”

He pauses again.

“So far.”

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.