The series comprises journals and notebooks kept by Peter Worthington, generally while covering news stories abroad but they also cover vacation travels and special events. The journals hold longer and more descriptive narrative accounts. There are journals for the Moscow Bureau (1965-66) and the defection of Olga Pharmakovsky (Belgium 1967); Biafra and Nigeria (1969-1970); climbing Mount Gongga (1982); Broadview-Greenwood election campaigns (1982, 1984); South Africa and Angola (1985-1986); China by bicycle (1988); Eritrea, Sudan, and Ethiopia (1988); Alsace and southern England (1989); Albania, and interviewing Robert Ford in Portugal (1990); Ireland (1992); Costa Rica, Cuba and his second heart attack (1993); and cross-Canada and United States (1997). For example, his journal for Angola in 1985 describes his impressions of the land and its people, travels with UNITA rebels to front at Cozombo, and meeting their leader Jonas Savimbi.
The notebooks cover a long list of travels and reporting assignments from India, China, and Egypt in 1959 to Antarctica in 2003, but generally only hold brief point-form or shorthand entries. As an example, the notebook for 1959 contains notes from interviews of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. His notebook for the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 includes his eyewitness account of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. Some other foreign assignments covered in the notebooks include Africa (1960), Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), the China-India war and invasion of New Guinea (1962), Cyprus and the Detroit riots (1967), Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), Nigeria and Biafra (1969-1970), Apollo 13 and the Charles Manson trial (1970), Peru, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands (1980), Zimbabwe and China (1982), Angola and South Africa (1985-1986), Zimbabwe and Zambia (1987), Sudan and the Eritrean war of independence (1988), and Albania and Mexico (1990), among others. It also includes address books for the Middle East (1957-1959), Africa (1960), and the Soviet Union (1965-1967).