The news organization famous for the motto, "If your mother
says she loves you, check it out," is finally checking out -- in the
shut the door and turn in the keys way.
Chicago's City News, for more than a century a boot camp and trial by
fire for young reporters, will file its last report Dec. 31. You can read all
about it in this Chicago Tribune story, "Fabled
bureau to file final page at year's end."
But don't stop there. If you're even slightly
curious about the old days in the newpaper racket, check out the
sidebar, "Reporters
mourn the death of Chicago's fabled City News Bureau."
(The Trib's headline writers need a synonym for
"fabled," but the word does seem to suggest the place of City News in their hearts -- not as big as a legend or as deep as a myth, but famous for teaching memorable lessons.)
While the first story blames "the Internet age" for bringing City News to an end, the Web is what makes possible the second story --
dozens of pages (and growing), full of lessons-learned, reminiscences,
war stories, nostalgia, and probably a few newsroom tall tales, all
uploaded by City News veterans in the past day or two. Across the street, the Sun Times suggests another villain, blaming the Tribune Company itself. A Sun Times reporter also scores an interview with one of the most famous City News alumni, novelist Kurt Vonnegut. (More on that below.)
City News began in the age of Mr. Dooley, when
10 daily newspapers competed for Chicago readers -- so fiercely that they decided to
reduce the pressure by creating a shared news bureau to collect each
day's crime and fire stories.
Before the days of journalism-student
"internships," City News was a place for young reporters to
learn-by-doing, and the alumni tell their stories here -- about bloody
accident scenes, encounters with cops and coroners, terrible pay and
tough-guy bosses. Their editors' tradition of sending reporters back for missing details was legendary
-- a middle initial needed here, a street number there (even for a vacant
lot), and call back the grieving parents to get the
name of the pet dog their child was chasing when he ran into traffic.
City News was, as one veteran puts it, "a place
that made you so scared of being wrong, being late or facing the
question 'Did you ask?' that you never even considered being scared of
anything else." It's hard to match that experience in a journalism
school classroom.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, 83, told Shamus Toomey of the Sun Times that City News not only gave him his $27 a week start as a writer, but taught him "how to be a tough guy." (How much toughening-up did he need? Vonnegut, at that point, had just come home from the Army -- and a German POW.) Here he is, on the City News experience:
"You know, it's something to boast about. I
saw a lot of gory stuff. People dying in awful ways," he said. "I wrote
one about a guy being crushed by an elevator. That's in one of my
books.
"Sure, you saw gruesome stuff. And funny stuff.... We got to
know the whole damn city and how to move around in it....
"There
was a mystery, a man's head found floating in a canal," he said. "It
finally turned out his wife had killed him. And fires. And all kinds of
stuff."
The 1920s City News inspired the classic
newsroom-rascal Hollywood films "The Front Page" and "His Girl
Friday," but it seems the "get the story at any cost" attitude held on at the bureau for most
of the century. Take the tale of a reporter named Vince Giorno,
said to have impersonated an FBI agent to trick the Secret Service into revealing when President Lyndon Johnson was coming to town.
Like the "If your
mother says she loves you..." motto, that Giorno anecdote apparently
was part of a City News education for generations of of reporters.
Says one, on the Trib site:
"I recently told the
Vince Giorno story to a lady friend, who is on the bench in Tucson. She
looked alarmed and said, 'Isn't that unethical for a journalist to do
that?' I paused, turned that over in my mind, and replied, 'Geez,
Sharon, I think it's a federal
offense.'"
Needless to say, we don't teach that kind of reporting in journalism schools. We're not very good at creating the fear of being wrong, or late, or beaten by the competition, that those old-timers' newsrooms could. (At least I know I'm not much in the "fear" category. Maybe I'll try more of that next semester.)
Finding the deadline-every-minute intensity and the camaraderie of the old City News would be difficult in a classroom -- and is hard to do, I suspect, at one of today's dwindling dailies. But I wonder how close to that experience enterprising students (or bloggers?) could come, now that the Web makes it so easy to get the story out. Could they crank up the pressure to "get it right" as much as "get it first"? In any case, if I were an editor, I'd like to see a graduate's resume say something like, "learned to be tough-minded, smart, skeptical and funny, to write fast... and, most importantly, to make sure all the facts check out."
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10:47:47 AM 
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