A crew from the March of Time newsreel is seen filming alongside a road on a cold winter’s day.

The March of Time was a once-a-month newsreel produced by TIME, Inc., starting in 1935 and ending in 1951. Never a money maker, the costs of producing the reel far exceeded what TIME made off of it, however it was popular with theater audiences.

Unlike the other reels, the March of Time was intended to be a journalistic effort of enlightening the audiences instead entertaining them with a bit of news thrown in. There were no beauty contests or dogs who could play the piano. Rather, the March of Time did ground-breaking stories such as exposing the conditions Southerners lived under during the Great Depression and the nepotism and favoritism from which the US Civil Service system suffered from at the time. A decade and a half before Ed Murrow and See it Now, the reel would bring the rights and the wrongs of the world to the American people in the form of motion picture journalism instead of the abstract words and still photos of a newspaper.

The March of Time died during television news’ infancy. Production costs estimated at around $50,000 an episode and declining audiences that started to favor sitting at home around the TV instead of going to the theater forced the hand of TIME into ending the reel. The late newsreel however, was a pioneer in its field and its legacy lives on in the 6-7 minute mini docs and investigative reports produced by stations around the country.

HBO is the current holder of the March of Time archives and has them online for watching for the price of registering for a free account.