Inside the newsroom: Reporting the war, day and night

Since the start of the latest war, Stephanie has started making capsules. No, she hasn’t traded her job as a journalist for that of a lemonade seller, nor her jeans for a bistro server’s apron. No, in journalistic jargon, a capsule is a short personal story about people’s lives. Some might say it’s a way of looking at events through the wrong end of the telescope, but that’s wrong: anecdotes are precisely what shape history's big picture. The proof: the “capsule” is called “chronicle of an ordinary war.”“The story that touched me the most was that of Abu Ali, the butcher from Antelias. It’s not so much that he refuses to leave the southern suburbs where he lives despite the bombings, nor that he gets on his moped every day to go to work, but rather seeing him forget his daily life, set aside his ‘little annoyances’ to immediately...