“The Big Story,” old time radio’s series that dramatized published news stories by real-life newspaper reporters is having its own story told.

Dr. Joseph Webb, a broadcasting  historian who has contributed to numerous old-time radio preservation projects, including an extensive website and podcast about the series “Suspense,” has published the first 85-page edition of a “Listeners Guide to The Big Story,” available at no charge at the Internet Archive.

Downloadable as a PDF file and in other formats, the guide links to the archive’s playable episodes of the series, as well as telling the true stories behind those radio dramas

The program scripts routinely changed or obscured the names of alleged criminals and victims alike, presumably to avoid legal complexities, given the details that had to be left out to tell a dramatic story and a half hour on the air.

(It also focused on a single reporter for each episode, even when the story in question was a team project.)

The true names of a reporter and newspaper were part of each episode, and the Pall Mall sponsor paid the original reporter a cash award.

Far from “breaking news,” the dramatized stories were sometimes 25 or 30 years in the past, but the original dates of publication were not given.

Add the changed names of the participants to the disappearance of some of the newspapers in question, Dr. Webb has done quite a job of repertorial sleuthing to connect the hints in the radio broadcasts to the historical facts, using newspaper online archives and other resources.

https://archive.org/details/listener-s-guide-to-the-big-story-09-26-2026

(I’ll be back to say more about this, as well as referencing his guide in my own posts about Big Story episodes.)