Note from JB: Continuous Wave floats atop the work of thousands, many of them volunteers, to save broadcast media’s ephemeral past. This project would be a lot less interesting without all the old radio publications, sound, and equipment that people have digitized or otherwise preserved.

So I’m excited to bring you today’s guest post from one of radio’s Archivist Kings, Andy Lanset. Lanset, now retired, is the founding director of the New York Public Radio Archives at WNYC/WQXR. Those stations’ histories go back more than a century, and Lanset has done far more than simply preserve recordings and documents.

Lanset’s own career in public broadcasting goes back to 1981. He’s been a reporter, producer, and engineer. He is able to bring radio’s past alive by helping us understand all the challenges producers faced.

His post today is all about the “actuality” — a term of art that originated in film, but in US radio came to mean recorded material gathered from the world outside the studio. An actuality can be just a soundbite, but the word contains the idea of something “real” — an unscripted moment; a bit of verité that carries all the subtext we hear in human voices. These days we call it “tape” — but its qualities were valued well before tape was a recording medium.

I’ve written about how unusual it was to hear anything unscripted on US network radio in its first decades. Now here’s Andy Lanset with the story of a few brave producers who tried to build programs around tape back in the days when tape did not exist.

Through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, broadcast news did not sound like anything we today would call “real.”

Radio news began as something drawn from text but not captured from life. Still, early broadcasters knew people wanted information and analysis of current events, so they found a way to offer “newscasts.” Those radio newscasts relied heavily on newspaper copy and wire services, read aloud by announcers. 

What we now call actualities — audio recorded on location — were largely absent because the recording technology of the time (sound trucks and disc recorders) made gathering field tape very challenging. Aside from occasional — and expensive — direct telephone feeds for major speeches or special events, broadcasts in the earliest decades of radio rarely included the voices of the people actually making news. 

As guest poster Cynthia Meyers explains here, The March of Time (debuting in 1931) and its imitators offered something more dramatic: Actors on these programs portrayed newsmakers, and sound effects stood in for real events. The result was entertaining and popular, but still removed from reality — and often susceptible to exaggeration or bias.

The challenge remained how to get sound from outside the studio and to edit it, at a time when there were no portable tape recorders, no simple editing tools, and no easy way to gather sound spontaneously. Every recording demanded planning, logistics, and technical support — not to mention, money.

Despite all this, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, radio evolved into a medium capable of presenting reality itself — something with real voices, real events, real sound. The story of how that happened is fascinating and worth understanding.

Sound recording technology moved in Hollywood much more quickly than at US networks. Sound-on-disc systems appeared as early as 1926, and by the end of the decade all major producers had adopted synchronized sound-on-film. 

Radio, by comparison, lagged behind. If it hoped to compete with film, it needed to sound like the world it described.

The turning point came with the development of instantaneous (also known as “transcription”) disc recording in the late 1920s, a technology more widely adopted by the mid-1930s. This recording technology that could be put in a truck and taken out of the studio and into the world.

Recording in those days meant cutting audio directly onto lacquer-coated aluminum discs using bulky, delicate machinery. A typical field setup could approach 1,000 pounds and required a skilled engineer to operate. 

Some of the earliest broadcasters to use this “portable” technology worked at the BBC, where Laurence Gilliam and Olive Shapley pioneered the integration of recorded actualities into documentary programming starting in the 1930s.

How did actuality-based programs come together in an era before our modern notions of cutting or splicing tape, much less before digital waveform editing, copying or pasting?

Back in the studio, producers worked with stacks of heavy lacquer discs. They marked in- and out-cues with grease pencils, then re-recorded selected segments in sequence onto new discs. Each edit required multiple turntables, precise timing, and careful handling to avoid audible distortion as records reached speed.

Generational loss further degraded audio quality: each re-recording introduced additional noise and reduced fidelity, much like making repeated copies of photocopies.

A typical 15-minute program might require several hours of raw sound, itself all recorded on discs, most of which would be discarded. 

Besides the cost of the truck and crew, the recording material itself was not cheap: In 1940, lacquer discs cost about $1.30 each for roughly 30 minutes of recording time (two sides) — about $29 in today’s dollars.

The goal back then, as it is now with narrative audio, was to construct a seamless story that used voiceovers, interviews, and music with transitions that felt natural and unobtrusive.

Once completed, the final program had to be pressed onto 16-inch transcription discs and delivered via snail-mail to stations.

The radio newsreel magazine format demanded enormous effort and cost with minimal turnaround time while struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing world events.

“Authenticity” was the selling point — the actual voices of both newsmakers and ordinary people, as opposed to actors imitating them.

But the economics behind that version of authenticity were punishing: not only was it labor intensive to produce, but discs were fragile and production itself incredibly difficult. 

That probably explains why experiments in actuality-driven radio in the US were short-lived in the pre-tape era.

In the United States, KMTR in Los Angeles experimented as early as 1937 with what it called “documentary radio,” incorporating recorded sound into its syndicated 20th Century International Radio Newsreel. The goal was clear: to make radio news sound more like the popular movie newsreels.

20th Century International Radio Newsreel’s history is a bit murky, and only one known recording, from 1939, appears to survive among collectors. (It’s a rather tepid report on an ocean liner disembarking.)

As tensions in Europe escalated in the late 1930s, the demand for more immediate and vivid reporting grew. Broadcasters saw an opportunity to capture some of the audience drawn to newspapers and theatrical newsreels.

In 1939, a small production company in New York called Ayers-Prescott launched a quarter-hour program called American Radio Newsreel (ARN). At a press conference, producer Erich Don Pam explained that programs would be recorded on Tuesdays and Thursdays, pressed onto discs, and shipped to stations for broadcast the following day. (Though the ad above claimed releases would occur three times weekly.)

“Recorded on the scene by reporters with portable equipment, the various interviews are edited and combined into a continuous program at the company's headquarters and are then pressed and sent to the subscribing stations,” Broadcasting magazine reported.

Newsweek observed that the format assembled “a diversified but unified table d’hôte for the ear” — something difficult to achieve in live broadcasting.

Ayers-Prescott reportedly secured as many as 300 subscribing stations. Even so, the service appears not to have lasted beyond a year. A small number of surviving discs are now held in the Randy Riddle Phonodisc Collection at Duke University.

By the spring of 1940, KMTR’s earlier experiment had evolved into Radio News Reel. Station head Victor Dalton joined with WMCA’s Donald Flamm to finance a national fleet of more than 100 specially equipped trucks: Ford V-8 sedan delivery wagons outfitted with disc-cutting equipment, microphones, mixing panels, and hundreds of feet of cable. In effect, they were mobile studios.

The audio equipment on board was self-powered, using batteries and converters, and could record almost anywhere. Crews typically consisted of two people: an engineer-driver and a producer-announcer. They ran cables into homes, offices, and event spaces to capture interviews and events with newsmakers.

From this material, Radio News Reel producers assembled twice-weekly, 15-minute programs distributed to subscribing stations. At its peak, the service reportedly reached some fifty affiliates.

The pitch was straightforward and ambitious: these were “the voices of people in the news… not re-enacted but transcribed where it happens.”

But by September 1940, Broadcasting reported that KMTR had “suspended” Radio News Reel and dismissed staff amid internal disputes. The whole operation had collapsed after only four months.

By late 1943, both Billboard and Variety noted that WMCA was considering reviving the format — despite the fact that “every radio newsreel idea to date has laid an egg.”

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, however, the BBC’s government-funded Radio Newsreel — broadcast via shortwave to North America beginning that summer — proved more durable. It continued for decades. 

Alongside newsreel experiments, documentary radio developed on a parallel track. Here, recorded sound was used less for rapid news delivery and more for crafted storytelling.

Herb Morrison’s on-the-spot recording of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster remains a defining moment, demonstrating the emotional power of recorded actuality.

In 1939, WOR incorporated similar eyewitness techniques into its annual year-in-review program under news director Alvin Josephy. That same year, WNYC established a BBC-inspired documentary unit employing “movie-like” editing methods.

And in 1940, with support from the Library of Congress and Alan Lomax, Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin recorded life in California migrant labor camps. Their work led to the 1942 WNYC documentary Songs of the Okies. 

The Library also supported a 1941 documentary, narrated by Arthur Miller, profiling Wilmington, North Carolina, on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II. [See this post for more on that project — JB]

In retrospect, we can see how all these pre-tape efforts to incorporate actualities into radio marked a turning point in broadcast journalism. 

Recording technology, however, lagged behind the ambition. True portability and efficient editing would not arrive until well after World War II. The first step was the introduction of the magnetic tape recorder, beginning with the first commercially available Brush Soundmirror in 1946. The Soundmirror recorded onto reels of paper-backed tape coated with metal oxide.

WNYC’s news director, Lily Supove Blake, was among the early adopters. The same year as the Soundmirror became available, she hauled one, along with its paper tape, to cover the National Aircraft Show in Cleveland. 

From the Soundmirror on, the technological drive was to improve the tape and lighten the load of the equipment. But the conceptual breakthrough of the audio actuality had already occurred. 

Long before podcasts and digital editing, radio producers were gathering real sound, shaping it into narrative form, and bringing audiences closer to events as they unfolded — despite formidable technical obstacles.

They were, in essence, inventing modern audio storytelling before they had the right tools for the job.

Thanks to super-archivist (and CW Member) Andy Lanset for helping us to imagine producing radio stories with trucks and turntables. Be on the lookout for a history of WNYC from him in book-form one of these days!