Newsreel

A newsreel is a short documentary film containing news stories and items of topical interest, once shown in cinemas before feature presentations as a regular part of the moviegoing experience. Newsreels were a major source of current events and visual news for the public from the nineteen tens through the nineteen sixties, in an era before television brought moving pictures of the news directly into people homes, and major studios and newsreel companies produced them on a regular release schedule covering politics, disasters, sport and other events of public interest. As television news broadcasting spread and became the dominant way audiences received current events with moving images, the newsreel gradually lost its purpose and largely disappeared from cinemas by the late nineteen sixties, though a small number of countries continued producing newsreels into the nineteen eighties and even the nineteen nineties. Surviving newsreel footage is now an important historical record of the twentieth century, preserved and studied by archives and historians as visual documentation of events that predate widespread television coverage.