NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - In his seven months as a correspondent for Yahoo's news division, Kevin Sites has lugged some 20 pounds of computer and photography gear into some of the most dangerous conflict zones in the world, filed dozens of news stories, video dispatches and photo essays from places that don't even have telephones (much less broadband connections) and endured the loneliness of being a "solo journalist" – all to reach a very small fraction of Yahoo's 400 million-plus members.

Yahoo (Research) has found that developing an audience for its first major foray into original reporting – the Hot Zone with Kevin Sites – hasn't been easy. In March, the Hot Zone attracted 1.38 million unique visitors, while Yahoo's broader news site, which aggregates news from a variety of sources, boasts more than 27 million users. Nor have advertisers fully embraced the Hot Zone as a place to sell their wares.

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None of this, however, has stopped other news organizations, especially broadcasters, from trying to emulate Yahoo's grand experiment. News anchors and correspondents at the big three networks are now blogging, and every major television news organization has started putting at least some of its video content on the Web. With evening news audiences shrinking (and aging), broadcasters realize they need to reach younger people and folks who simply aren't able to catch a 6:30 p.m. newscast.

But just as Yahoo helped change the way people consume "print" news by aggregating stories from many different sources and facilitating instant feedback from readers, the Internet media company also seems to be ushering in a new form of multimedia journalism.

The Hot Zone – the premise is that Sites, who made his name as an NBC News correspondent, will visit twenty or so war zones in the course of a year – offers viewers a mix of video clips, still photographs and news articles, supplemented by maps, links to non-profits working in the various regions and reader feedback.

And it is a medium that is evolving. Yahoo plans to launch a redesign in the coming weeks to reflect lessons learned since the Hot Zone was introduced seven months ago. Yahoo News General Manager Neil Budde says the site will be easier to navigate and will highlight the strongest content Sites delivers, which may be video some days, and a text story another day.

At least for now, Yahoo seems committed to developing original news content, even as it has pared down its ambitions for homegrown entertainment. Last month, Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo Media Group, said his group would focus on distributing content from its media partners and users rather than a slate of made-for-the-'Net television shows that had been on his drawing board.

Says Budde: "In news we haven't changed our approach at all, which is to aggregate content from our partners, to have some component of original material...and partnering with other media companies, taking what they have and bringing it online."

Those partnerships are helping webify some pretty stodgy news organizations. A venture with CBS's "60 Minutes," for example, helped bring the old-school news magazine to the 'Net in a pretty meaningful way. Yahoo and CBS took extra material from an interview Ed Bradley did with Tiger Woods and cut it into a handful of shorter, jazzier video clips. The first batch of Yahoo clips were so compelling, Budde says, that a CBS producer wondered aloud why some of them hadn't been used in the 60 Minutes piece.

"We're not competing with television or print," adds Sites, who recently stopped in New York before heading to Asia. "We can amplify what they're doing, and they can amplify what I'm doing." The Scripps Howard News Service, for example, makes Sites' written reports available to newspapers that subscribe to the wire service.

It certainly makes sense for news organizations to partner with Yahoo, or at least take a page from its playbook. Yahoo has tremendous reach with readers and viewers, many of whom love news but no longer pick up newspapers or turn on the nightly news. And Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, points out that companies such as Yahoo, by virtue of the medium in which they work, can experiment with different formats and layouts and combinations of content, easily adding and subtracting what doesn't work.

"They have a staggeringly huge potential to adapt to the 'Net, and to invent stuff," he says. That's a gene missing from most news people, he notes: "Most journalists have worked their whole careers without inventing a new product."

Meanwhile, Yahoo executives and Sites both insist they are pleased with the Hot Zone thus far. The company says unique visitors represent just one measure of the program's reach: They say Hot Zone visitors are forwarding the content to other users and staying on the site for long periods of time – something advertisers like.

Neil Budde says now that the Hot Zone has been up and running for a while, marketers have a better understanding of what they would be supporting. Recent advertisements have included trailers for the movies "Syriana" and "Flight 93."

And Sites, who says he is talking to Yahoo about extending the relationship (one idea he's mulling is Hot Zone America), feels he has one of the better gigs in journalism, one that allows him to go virtually anywhere he wants and file the stories he sees fit.

"Brian Williams said to me: 'You're doing what I want to do.' This has been some of the most meaningful journalism of my life."