The Auto/Biographical Journalist and Stories of Lived Experience

New beginnings are crucial to career construction. This paper explores how stories of 'lived experience' are used by journalists making the transition into education to narrate their own lives. It contends that personal stories can provide the journalist moving from newsroom to classroom with an authentic means to write the next chapter in a life story, since storytelling is the journalist's 'stock in trade'. The paper's principal feature is 2 stories, drawn from in-depth, biographical interviews, with well-established broadcast journalists who reflect on their experiences as educators at the BBC College of Journalism. The relationship between professional and personal identity is considered and the emergent concept of 'auto/biographical journalism' is utilised to scrutinise the role of self within journalism as a vocation and journalism education as a career choice. Here, autobiographical journalism as catharsis, the role of epiphanies in self-stories and the confessional genre provide context. My background as a former BBC journalist and my current role as a journalism educator inform this paper: hence, it concludes with personal reflections on the ways in which, as journalists telling the stories of others, we can also draw on our own stories to shape our personae in different periods of our lives.