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Great Big Story

cinematic storytelling company

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ53817372 ↗
Source-derived summary

Great Big Story is a media company producing micro-documentaries based in London. Launched in October 2015 by CNN, the company created 2,600 videos, being published on various websites such as Facebook and YouTube. Videos produced by the company featured varied subjects conducting their routine of their unusual or intriguing acts.

Great Big Story employed a total of 84 staff members, spread across its three locations. At the head of the company was Andrew Morse and Courtney Coupe.

On September 23, 2020, Great Big Story announced on Twitter that the company would be closing. On September 30, the company uploaded a farewell video on their YouTube channel declaring the end of the company. More than two years later, on January 16, 2023, Great Big Story announced on Facebook and Instagram that UK-based media company WhyNow and CNN agreed to a partnership to relaunch the company. On February 15, 2023, Great Big Story uploaded a video titled "A New Chapter", marking the return of the channel.

Founders

The company was co-founded by Chris Berend and Andrew Morse.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Great Big Story” is cinematic storytelling company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Great, Story and cinematic, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2015, 2020, 2023—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2015. For this dossier, Great, Story and cinematic is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “cinematic storytelling company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q53817372. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015, 2020 and 2023.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Great Big Story”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Great Big Story primary sources, Great Big Story archive and Great research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Great Big Story”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Great Big Story” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.