1947–1955 on radio · NBC

The Big Story

A real reporter, a real case, and a five-hundred-dollar cheque every week.

The Big Story is the ancestor of every reconstruction show on television now, and it ran on both media at once for most of its life, with the Pall Mall sponsorship carried across. The format's honesty was its selling point — the reporter was named, the paper was named, the cheque was real — and it survived the transfer to pictures better than almost anything else here, because the appeal was the case rather than the voice.

On radio

Radio from 2 April 1947

On television

Television from 16 September 1949

The overlap

Both versions ran until 1955, and ended within months of each other

50 recordings · New York

NBC network broadcasts and transcriptions held by the Internet Archive; several carry the reporter and paper in the title. Public domain (US network broadcast, copyright not renewed); no Creative Commons or non-commercial terms apply.