Should have kept on reading. . .that answers one of my questons. . .
http://kevinsites.net/bio.php
Kevin Sites: Combat Correspondent
Kevin Sites is a pioneering, multi-media journalist who often works as a one-man unit, using portable, digital technology to report, write, edit and transmit his stories from conflict areas around the world. He has covered war zones in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.
Most recently, as a non-embedded correspondent for CNN, Sites provided viewers with independent reports from the frontlines of Northern Iraq. Traveling with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sites broadcasted live as coalition air strikes hit Iraqi positions in Chamchamal and Kirkuk.
Sites's reporting was cut short, however, when Iraqi Fedayeen militia outside of Tikrit captured him and his team. They were stripped of all their equipment and threatened with death until their Kurdish translator negotiated their release after four hours in captivity.
Sites’s war blog, kevinsites.net, utilized text, digital images and audio to provide readers with a more intimate behind-the-scenes look at the people of Iraq, the war and how it was being covered. The site received millions of visits, and continues to draw an active readership.
Sites also spent nearly six months on the front lines in Afghanistan for NBC and MSNBC News, covering the Northern and Eastern Alliance forces prior to and after the fall of the Taliban. He shot some of the earliest video of ground combat there, including the first American casualty--a journalist wounded during a Taliban mortar attack.
Sites has made several trips to Colombia, covering U.S. anti-drug efforts, including cocoa spraying operations and the training of the Colombian government’s Jungle Commandos. When Colombian paramilitary forces captured travel writer, Robert Young Pelton and his companions in November 2002, Sites interviewed them live, via videophone from the edge of the jungle, shortly after their release.
As a producer for NBC News, he received an Edward R. Murrow Award for coverage of the war in Kosovo and was nominated for a national Emmy Award for contributions to a series on landmines.
During a two-year sabbatical, he served as Broadcast Lecturer in the Journalism Department of California Polytechnic State in San Luis Obispo and was named Distinguished Lecturer by the California Faculty Association for the 2000-2001 Academic Year. While there, he initiated a joint research project with Xybernaut Inc. to modify wearable computers for solo digital reporting.
He has worked in local, cable and network news, including ABC's This Week with David Brinkley and NBC's Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Additionally, he has published numerous articles in newspapers and magazines and was the author of a monthly media column for the New Times alternative weekly. Sites has a Master's Degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Sites now runs his own production company, Shoot First Films, from his home in Pismo Beach, California.