In the spring of 1935, the director-screenwriter Eduard Jürisson-Vallaste and the cinematographer Armas Hirvonen created a staged documentary Ajalehe sünd (Birth of the Newspaper). It is a black-and-white silent film with a duration of about 13 minutes. The film shows the production of a newspaper, starting with the felling of trees, followed by activities in the paper mill, editorial office, and printing house, and ending with ready-to-read newspapers sold by newsboys on the street. Short intertitles label and identify stages in the work process. As far as is known, this privately made documentary was never shown publicly. The reason for this was the restrictive legislation regulating the Estonian film market, which went into effect immediately after the documentary was made. The film is kept at the National Archives of Estonia. It was restored and digitized in 2016 and is available online (https://arkaader.ee/landing/bc/rHczO7kKnl/eTAtSAFm91/7vMe-_b4QU/70Bd5irCHu).
The current commentary reveals the film’s background, its participants and topics. Since Jürisson-Vallaste was a reporter at the Vaba Maa journalism publishing house, he recorded the practices of his workplace in this documentary. The film’s intertitles name only one person, the American journalist Hubert Knickerbocker, but the current commentary identifies several other participants and briefly introduces their careers, such as the court reporter and feuilletonist Pedro Krusten, the parliamentary reporter and commentator Arnold Schulbach (Arno Süvalep), managing editors Olev Soots and Aleksander Grünberg (Aksel Valgma), the editor-in-chief Eduard Laaman, the press photographer Hans Soosaar, the illustrator Verner Birkenfeldt, and the proofreader and editor in charge Tõnis Tomp.
The comments also reveal the routines of journalistic work at that time, e.g. the industrial nature of Vaba Maa publishing house, the conveyor-belt approach for writing news, the newspaper’s interaction with its readers, and the working process of the printing house (typesetting, stereotyping, printing by rotary press). Some humorous staged plots are interwoven between the documentary footage. Therefore, the film’s focus is on a smart and venturesome reporter. All in all, the documentary celebrates modernist news journalism with its emphasis on newsiness, efficiency, and a more mercantile and sensational approach to news. That very same Vaba Maa publishing house brought this type of journalism to Estonia in the 1920s.