Skip to main contentSkip to navigation
Print subscriptions
Sign in
Search jobs
Search
The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Before my time

A series in which Guardian writers, correspondents and editors interview their predecessors about how the job - and the subject matter - has changed over the years

18 October 2021

  • A newly acquitted Clive Ponting at the centre of a media scrum in 1985

    The spies who hated us: reporting on espionage and the secret state

    Our security correspondent speaks to a predecessor about an era of spooks, leaks and open hostility from MI5

27 September 2021

  • Tony Ageh

    ‘Is that live?’ The pioneers who put the ‘new’ into news

    Our head of editorial innovation speaks to Tony Ageh, who performed a similar role 30 years ago when the internet was in its infancy and experimentation was everything

20 September 2021

  • Jessica Elgot, the Guardian’s chief political correspondent, at her desk in the press room at Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament, in central London.

    ‘We never went home before 10pm’: 50 years of reporting on politics and power

    Our chief political correspondent compares notes on the chaos, the glamour, the scoops, with her predecessor Julia Langdon

13 September 2021

  • Data image for ‘Before my time’ piece by Pamela Duncan

    ‘Numbers you can tell stories with’: a decade of Guardian data journalism

    Our acting data projects editor speaks to her predecessor, Simon Rogers, about how their work became integral to the newsroom

6 September 2021

  • The Guardian offices. King’s Place, King’s Cross. London. Photograph by David Levene. 31/10/18

    Life on the newsdesk: ‘Technology has changed. Expectations haven’t’

    Nadia Khomami reflects on how her role at the heart of the paper compares with predecessor Jean Stead, who joined in 1963

26 August 2021

  • GERMANY-EUROPE-WEATHER-CLIMATE-FLOODS<br>Military personnel inspects the area on a boat across the Ahr river in Rech, Rhineland-Palatinate, western Germany, on July 21, 2021, after devastating floods hit the region. (Photo by Christof STACHE / AFP) (Photo by CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP via Getty Images)

    Reporting on the climate crisis: ‘For years it was seen as a far-off problem’

    Our correspondent talks to her predecessor about how global heating went from a ‘slow burn’ to the biggest story of all

23 August 2021

  • A BBC Micro Computer in use in a home in the 1980s. At launch the Cambridge built machine made home computing affordable for the first time.

    The Guardian’s first Tech editor: ‘They gave me a demo and showed me things I couldn’t believe’

    Victor Keegan, the correspondent who went on to put the first Guardian content online, recalls the chance news item in 1981 that opened up the possibilities of home computing and kicked off the paper’s dedicated coverage of a social revolution

9 August 2021

  • Gorbachev and Putin: representing two eras of Soviet and Russian history.

    Jonathan Steele: ‘I came to Russia a political correspondent and left a crime reporter’

    The veteran journalist, who moved to Moscow in 1988, charted the collapse of a superpower. But, he tells his successor, the Gorbachev revolution has been poisoned

2 August 2021

  • Two large tables filled with people on both sides in the corner of a room with panelling and built-in bookcases, with huge bundles of paper stuck on spikes in between every occupant

    The changing art of the subeditor: ‘You had to read the type upside down’

    A deputy news production editor at the Guardian speaks to colleagues about how cutting and correcting copy has evolved over decades

12 July 2021

  • A column of people, led by two women carrying Nazi flags, and others a huge banner saying 'Dem Deutschen Menschen kann nur

    Nazis, fear and violence: when reporting from Berlin was dangerous

    Our Berlin correspondent salutes the man who did his job 100 years ago, when it was much more dangerous and unpredictable

5 July 2021

  • A Palestinian child kneels behind a sheet of corrugated iron as they look at an armoured vehicle

    Reporting on Israel: ‘Thirty years on, we are still covering the same old enmities’

    The Guardian’s outgoing Jerusalem correspondent Oliver Holmes talks to predecessor Ian Black about how much – and how little – the job has changed over the years

27 June 2021

  • Carry On Again Doctor (1969), with (from left) Joan Sims, Jim Dale, Hattie Jacques and Charles Hawtrey

    Boozy lunches and sober sandwiches: how the Guardian film critic’s job has changed

    Peter Bradshaw chats with his predecessor Derek Malcolm about routes into the profession, screenings and social media

21 June 2021

  • Hella Pick, photographed in London in 2017

    ‘A woman, a refugee, and a Jew’: pioneering reporter Hella Pick on breaking down walls

    A former Guardian foreign correspondent tells a successor about defying prejudice and gaining global acclaim for her work

14 June 2021

  • WG Grace. playing cricket, Pele celebrates his goal at the 1970 world cup final, Angelique Kerber in Dubai, March 2021

    More than just a game: the ageless art of the sports writer

    As a big summer of sport begins, Barney Ronay traces our reporting lineage back to giants such as Cardus and CLR James

6 June 2021

  • Snow in Cross Street, Manchester today Cross Street file, GNM Archive ref. GUA/6/9/1/4/M box 2

    The Guardian librarian: ‘There was a tart exchange with management about photocopiers’

    The Guardian’s head of research recalls how his predecessor Geoffrey Whatmore transformed the paper’s archive in the 50s

3 June 2021

  • Richard Nixon and Donald Trump: two eras of Washington politics.

    ‘Nose to the grindstone’: how Simon Winchester covered Watergate for the Guardian

    The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief interviews our former America correspondent on how his time in DC was dominated by the Nixon scandal

23 May 2021

  • Dior And Models<br>25th April 1950: Fashion couturier Christian Dior (1905 - 1957), designer of the ‘New Look’ and the ‘A-line’, with six of his models after a fashion parade at the Savoy Hotel, London. (Photo by Fred Ramage/Keystone/Getty Images)

    The Guardian’s first fashion editor: ‘Highbrows no longer ignore high fashion’

    Jess Cartner-Morley, associate editor (Fashion), looks through the archives of Alison Adburgham, one of the pioneers of press style journalism

17 May 2021

  • San Gimignano, Tuscany, Italy; the vista is little changed, but the ‘Italian job’ is very different to how it was 30 years ago

    Long lunches, tea with the mafia … how reporting Italy has changed over the years

    Rome correspondent Angela Giuffrida asks predecessor John Hooper how he covered the country in the pre-internet era

9 May 2021

  • The former DUP leader Ian Paisley in 1986, a ‘quite grim’ time in Northern Ireland, recalls Paul Johnson.

    'People got nervous if a bag was left on a chair': Paul Johnson on Northern Ireland

    The Guardian’s former deputy editor recalls his time reporting from Belfast during the Troubles
Explore more on these topics
  翻译：