In 1914, the film company Swedish Cinema Theatre (Svenska Bio) which later became SF, started to produce a regular newsreel. Infrequent production had started two years prior, but after 1914 the SF-newsreel was produced on a weekly basis. The raw model came from France, where film companies like Pathé and Gaumont had been compiling short documentaries into longer features since 1908.

The SF-newsreel would be shown in Swedish cinemas for nearly half a century. It has become known as the SF-Newsreel [SF-Journalen], but it was renamed several times. From the First World War, until the breakthrough of television in the late 1950s, it was the leading news and entertainment mediator in audiovisual form to the Swedish audience.

The SF-Newsreel was a popular item in the cinema repertoire. After 1930, when sound and a narrator's voice were used, the genre was further vitalized. The sound changed the form of the newsreels into a more rapid mediation of news, more like radio broadcasts. The typically clattering voice of Gunnar Skoglund in the SF-Newsreel, was soon one of the most copied voices in the country.

However, the SF-Newsreel was not the only newsreel shown in Swedish cinemas. Other companies produced newsreels for the Swedish film market too, like the Swedish Paramount Newsreel or the Nuet-Newsreel.