Fowler-Watt develops ‘auto/biographical journalism’ to describe a position in which narrating the lives of others cannot be cleanly separated from the narrator’s own accumulated experience. Her study of experienced broadcast journalists moving into education shows how professional identity is reconstructed through remembered episodes, retrospective interpretation and biographical interviews. Storytelling gives scattered experience coherence, but that coherence is produced rather than discovered: present circumstances reorganise the significance of past events. The author’s own history as a BBC journalist is therefore not hidden outside the research frame; it becomes part of the reflexive conditions under which questions are formulated and accounts understood. The article links life writing, journalism studies and career-construction theory, but its broader methodological importance lies in making first-person proximity explicit without collapsing subject and observer. The chronicle of another life can contain the chronicler’s trajectory as a visible coordinate, turning positionality into a recordable condition of interpretation.
