Remember those newsreels from the old movie palace days, when instead of previews of upcoming features you saw some choppy-edited film about current events accompanied by a booming voice-over?
OK, I don’t really remember them, either, except from some TV channels that show oldies movies. The cinema newsreels were long gone by my day, outdone by television news that could deliver current events daily. I’m not old enough to remember a time without television – though I do remember when a lot of families still had black and white sets.
Anyway, I was at the library and ran across a movie on DVD called “Newsfront,” about the newsreel days and the cameramen who chased news back then. Sadly, I can’t recommend it, at least to fellow Americans. It was filmed in Australia, no doubt for an Australian audience, and many of the references and a lot of the dialog was so hard to follow that I didn’t finish watching the film. However, the newsreels struck me as sort of a cross between a documentary film and today’s television news reports.
The movie managed to convey the competitive aspect of newsreel crews trying to capture the best angles for celebrity appearances and historic events. There was a knack to writing the report that went with the filmed images. Politics and audience tastes shaped the narrative. Even then, news crews were scrambling to get the scoop and edge out the competition.
It was a relatively short-lived form of journalism, lasting from about 1908 to the early 1960s or so.
Did we lose something when newsreels faded into history? After all, the news is still reported, much faster and from more places than ever before.
But we don’t sit in the giant living room that was the old-time movie theater, surrounded by our peers and privy to their immediate reactions as they watch the same images and hear the same words as we do.
Are there lessons here for the modern news consumer? Will we lose something when print journalism finally becomes too expensive and old-fashioned to deliver? After all, the words and pictures can simply move to the Web.
In fact, they already have. Why isn’t it the same?