These days the recreation of news, or what I call near-news events, is not uncommon. On The Media recently devoted a segment to such 're-enactments' on television.  But the genre has a history that goes back to the early days of radio.

There were no reporters in the field with tape recorders. This even predates 'portable' fifty-pound recording devices requiring coated aluminum discs and a cutting stylus. It was 1929, and Time magazine began to send out daily releases they called 'news casts' along with transcription discs containing five-minute dramas they referred to as 'news acting.' They started to use the name March of Time. Others followed suit. Among them, WBEN Buffalo, owned by the Buffalo Evening News. Their inaugural broadcast in September 1930, included a dramatization of items from the newspaper. There were other local stations that tried it as well, but Time magazine kept with it and six-months later launched the national broadcast of The March of Time over the CBS network. It was March 6, 1931, that the network began the weekly series sponsored by Time magazine. They would take three to five leading stories of the week and give them to dramatists to script into short recreations for actors in the studio.

By 1939 The March of Time's fifteen-minute program was regarded as the most successful and longest-running of the genre. Each week its listener-winning format and formula required 1,000 'man-hours' by some 72 writers, editors, actors, engineers, and producers. Its actors were described as "adept at impersonation and can simulate the voices of news figures so well that it is frequently difficult for listeners to believe they are not actually hearing the voices of these news figures...Aiding in accuracy is a library of thirty-second recordings of over six hundred voices that may possibly be in the news. March of Time actors listen to the inflection and accent of these persons and are able to reproduce a startling duplication of them." [1] These touts were joined with claims of expert fact-checking and journalistic objectivity, although listening to them now, it's pretty clear they towed Time Inc.'s editorial line.

Other pioneers of this genre followed with varied success. Among them was The News Parade, a series produced by The Marben Advertising Company and airing on WMCA in New York.  Their broadcasts were a mix of Hollywood gossip, crimes of passion, and hard national and international news. In the above broadcast of March 26, 1933, there are three stories. Among them (the last item in the line-up) is what I believe to be the earliest extant broadcast of news about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Remember, Hitler had only become Chancellor of German on January 30th of that year.  

The radio newsreel drama's days were numbered. KMTR in Los Angeles released the 20th Century International Radio Newsreel as early as February 1939. Although, as of this writing, the extent of its syndication is not clear. By November of that year the American Radio Newsreel, a quarter-hour program produced by Ayers-Prescott in New York by Erich Don Pam was launched. Broadcasting reported content for the productions was "recorded on the scene by reporters with portable equipment, the various interviews are edited and combined into a continuous program."[2] The company claimed 150 subscribers to their transcription service.

On the heels of Ayers-Prescott was a joint syndicated transcription effort between KMTR Hollywood and WMCA in New York. Radio News Reel, a twice- weekly release of quarter-hour reports that billed itself in an organ-backed opening announcement as "the voices of people in the news... this innovation in the gathering and presentation of the news comes to you unauthored, not re-enacted but transcribed where it happens, as it happens, these are the actual voices of the people who make the news, not impersonations!" The short-lived syndicated service had some fifty subscribers and began in the spring of 1940 with several trucks in California and New York equipped with engineers and disc cutters.[3] The syndicated service came to an end by September of that year.

Radio News Reel letterhead from 1940.

(National Archives of Israel)

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[1] "Best News Dramatization - The March of Time," Best Broadcasts of 1938-39, ed., Max Wylie, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1939, pgs. 138-139.

[2] "Ayers-Prescott Starts Newsreel Disc Program," Broadcasting, December 1, 1939, pg. 57. 

[3] Goldstein, Leon, "Documentary Radio," Radio Craft, September 1940,  pg. 175.