Other forms: newsreels
A newsreel is a short cinema film of current events. Watch the newsreel, a wartime newsreel, newsreel footage.
Before television it was how most people saw the news moving rather than only reading it, and it ran before the main film. It died in the 1960s once television took over, and the surviving reels are now the visual record of half a century.
1nounnewsreelA short cinema film of current events.
“During the war, people went to the cinema partly to watch the newsreels from the front.”
newsreel is a film.
News plus reel, from the early twentieth-century cinema.
From news + reel.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA