This film is part of Free

News in the Making

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

Promotional 1964 24 mins

From the collection of:

Logo for Wessex Film and Sound Archive

Overview

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.