Pathé News

British newsreel producer (1910–1970)

Pathé News was a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the United Kingdom. Its founder, Charles Pathé, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era. The Pathé News archive is known today as "British Pathé". Its collection of news film and movies is fully digitised and available online. In 1958, it was sold again to Warner Bros. and became Warner Pathé. Pathé eventually stopped producing the cinema newsreel in February 1970 as it could no longer compete with television. During the newsreels' run, the narrators included Bob Danvers Walker, Dwight Weist, Dan Donaldson, André Baruch and Clem McCarthy among others.

The library itself was sold with Associated British Picture to EMI Films and then others, including The Cannon Group (which split the feature film and newsreel divisions) and the Daily Mail and General Trust, before relaunching in its own right in 2009. The feature film division is now part of StudioCanal and is no longer connected with Pathé, the French film company and the original parent of British Pathé. In 2002, partially funded by the UK National Lottery, the entire archive was digitised. The British Pathé archive now holds over 3,500 hours of filmed history, 90,000 individual items and 12 million stills. On 7 February 2009, British Pathé launched a YouTube channel of its newsreel archive. From March 2010, British Pathé relaunched its archive as an online entertainment site, making Pathé News a service for the public as well as the broadcasting industry. In May 2010, The Guardian was given access to the British Pathé archive, hosting topical videos on its website. In May 2012, British Pathé won the FOCAL International Award for Footage Library of the Year. In April 2014, British Pathé uploaded the entire collection of 85,000 historic films to its YouTube channel as part of a drive to make the archive more accessible to viewers all over the world. As of 2024, the British Pathé YouTube channel had 1.3 billion views and 3.09 million subscribers. By 2020, the British Pathé archive now includes material from the Reuters historical collection. Additionally, as historically the British Pathé newsreels covered events in the island of Ireland, while it was variously part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Northern Ireland, the Irish Free State, and later a Republic, that part of the archive was shared with the Irish Film Institute's Irish Film Archive, curated as The Irish Independence Film Collection. This also resulted in a more accurate cataloguing of the locations, people, and the historical context, than the UK office would have historically had.

British Pathé produced a number of programmes and series as well as newsreels, such as Pathé Eve and Astra Gazette. In 2010, BBC Four reversioned the 1950s Pathé series Time To Remember, which was narrated by the actor Stanley Holloway, and broadcast it as a thematic 12 part series. BBC News continues to use extracts in its coverage of various events, such as Windrush, and World War II.

The U. S. version of Pathé News, which began in 1911 as Pathé Weekly, was no longer associated with the British version and Pathé Frères' other newsreels around the world after 1921, when Pathé Frères' American subsidiary, Pathé Exchange, was spun off as an independent business. RKO Radio Pictures acquired the twice weekly Pathé News along with most of the rest of the Pathé Exchange assets in 1931, rebranding it RKO Pathé News. In 1947, Warner Bros. purchased the newsreel from RKO, rebranding it in turn as Warner Pathé News. Warner also produced a series of 38 theatrical short subjects and 81 issues of the News Magazine of the Screen series, which added to the Pathé film properties and were part of the company's extensive film library. Producer/editor Robert Youngson was primarily responsible for these series and won two Academy Awards for them. In 1956, Warner Bros. discontinued the production of the theatrical newsreel and sold the Pathé News film library, the 38 theatrical short subjects, the Pathé News Magazine of the Screen, the crowing rooster trademark and the copyrights and other properties to Studio Films, Inc.—shortly thereafter named Pathé Pictures, Inc.— At this time, the new owners, Barnett Glassman, Samuel A. Costello and Joseph P. Smith acquired ownership and subsequently re branded the name and film properties of both companies to Pathé News, Inc.

A 50% interest in the Pathé News Film Library was sold to Sherman Grinberg in 1958. The Sherman Grinberg Film Library licensed the marketing rights to the Pathé News Film Library. Pathé News, Inc retained the sole exclusive right to sell the library. The series of 38 theatrical short subjects and 81 issues of the News Magazine of the Screen series, Milestones of the Century, the Men of Destiny series, Showtime at the Apollo, as well as many other titles are marketed by Historic Films Archive, LLC. In 2016, the children of Joseph P. Smith, acquired 100% of the stock. Today, Pathé News, Inc. is a family owned private company. Other U. S. newsreel series included Paramount News (1927–1957), Fox Movietone News (1928–1963), Hearst Metrotone News/News of the Day (1914–1967), Universal Newsreel (1929–1967) and The March of Time (1935–1951).