Saturday, January 6, 2018

Imagine that you are a time-traveling journalist and you can choose 70CE the fall of Jerusalem to cover for the evening news/online news. What is the "catchy" title of your story, what angle of the story would you cover, and what is the human interest aspect of the story?

If I was a time-travelling journalist, I’m not sure I would want to be found out to be a time-traveller, so I might not want to give too much away with my story!
As well as this, I would have to think about whether I wanted to focus on a big historical event, like the burning of a temple, or an individual approach, like the sorrow that a soldier might have felt when they saw their friend die.
An important human interest angle here is to imagine the uncertainty, famine, and panic that many people would have experienced during and after the attack: it can be easy to think of wars and sieges as big events and miss out on the emotional impact that they have on the individual people who live through them (or who, sadly, don’t live). Telling us about people we can imagine being, or who we know, is one way journalists can connect with their audience.
For me personally, I would choose to highlight the loss of place and the loss of community. Flavius Josephus said about the siege that “the war had laid all the signs of beauty quite waste: nor if any one that had known the place before, had come on a sudden to it now, would he have known it again.” This means that the war had destroyed the city beyond what anybody could ever recognize. For this angle I would choose the title “Our city is gone, so where are we now?”

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