News in the Making

From the collection of

Wessex Film and Sound Archive is based in Winchester. Providing the opportunity to see and hear history, the archive contains nearly 40,000 film, video and sound recordings relating to Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, ranging from late Victorian times to the present day. It includes both amateur and professional material, local newsreels, military and maritime subjects, as well as footage produced by individuals, businesses and organisations.

News in the Making

Wessex Film and Sound Archive
1964-01-01
Sound
24m

See how stories made it onto the presses - the old fashioned way - in this fascinating and nostalgic film promoting the Portsmouth Evening News

This promotional film starts with an accident at sea. After a call the rescue services arrive at the scene. A reporter and photographer are also dispatched to the location. The film then shows how their account of the rescue goes through various editorial, chemical and typographical processes before being printed onto newspaper and distributed to all points in the region. Many of the processes and machinery featured in the film are extinct in today's newspaper industry.

Originally established by Graham Niven in 1877, the Portsmouth Evening News was taken over by a syndicate which included an ex-Liberal MP for Sunderland, Samuel Storey, and the Scottish American industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, to further their Radical Liberal political aims. When the syndicate broke up, in 1885, Storey kept his controlling interest. The paper ran as a separate company until 1934, when it became part of the Storey family's Portsmouth and Sunderland Newspapers Ltd. Its offices, seen in this film, were once the premises of a slaughterhouse in Portsmouth's Stanhope Road, though the paper moved, in 1969, to new premises in Hilsea.

Near Your Local Cinema

Local goods for local people! Screen advertising wasn’t all national brands and chain stores.

Purpose-built cinemas began appearing around Britain shortly before WWI, booming in popularity during the War and developing into the ‘picture palaces’ of the 1920s - when adverts jostled for space alongside newsreels before the main feature. Local businesses were quick to see the potential of a big screen and a captive audience to promote their wares.

While they didn’t have access to the budgets of the national brands, regionally-specific businesses had the benefit of that personal touch. Products and services evolved over time, but that scratchy ad for your local Indian restaurant, so integral to the cinema-going experience into the 1990s, had its roots in the booming entrepreneurship of the industry many decades before.