Watching News in Public: The Rituals and Responses of Newsreel Theater Audiences.

From roughly 1930 to 1950, newsreel theaters played important roles in urban and film cultures. These small (200- to 600-seat) theaters showed hour-long loops of news that patrons could drop into from morning to midnight. Some aspects of the newsreel theater experience extended the rituals of nickelodeon spectatorship of earlier decades, and others predated the post–World War II development of television news consumption. Newsreel theaters allowed patrons to pass the time watching motion picture news, and they became politically charged spaces offering ways for people to watch and react vocally to the news in public as members of groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]