Yesterday, March 13, 2010, was the anniversary of the birth of correspondent-based broadcast news. After Hitler absorbed Austria on March 12, 1938, the Murrow Boys, led by the legendary Edward R. Murrow, cobbled together a news roundup from European capitals to provide Americans a window on the dramatic events in Europe--events that led inexorably to World War II. Hosted by William L. Shirer, the author of The Berlin Diaries and later The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the Murrow team performed flawlessly in what would become the pattern of all subsequent news radio broadcasts and then television.

Before March 13, 1938 Murrow and his colleagues had been confined to organizing live broadcasts of choirs and orchestras, and arranging radio lectures by such figures as Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw. The world crisis enabled Murrow and his colleagues to get their first live news airtime.

It was a revolution in the history of broadcasting.

Soon North Dakota's Eric Sevareid joined the Murrow Boys.

The Dakota Institute is making a documentary film about Sevareid, to be released in 2012, on the centennial of his birth in Velva, North Dakota. With the North Dakota Humanities Council the Dakota Institute is hosting a national public humanities symposium on Sevareid and the Murrow Boys September 30-October 3, 2010 in Bismarck.