City News Bureau of Chicago
Encyclopedia
City News Bureau of Chicago
, or City Press, was a news bureau
that served as one of the first cooperative
news agencies in the United States
. It was founded in the late 19th century by the newspapers of Chicago to provide a common source of local and breaking news and also used by them as a training ground for new reporters. Hundreds of reporters have "graduated" from the City News Bureau into newspaper dailies - both local and national - or other avenues of writing.
The City News Bureau had reporters in all important news sites, courthouses, Chicago City Hall
, the County Building, Criminal Court
s, as well as having as many as ten police reporters on duty. It operated around the clock and all year round. The reporters, though young, worked in competition with some of the best reporters in the country, working on the same stories as all the others, questioning politicians and police, and fighting for scoops.
They covered every single death reported to the coroner
's office, every important meeting, every news conference, every court case that had once been a news story, even if the trial wasn't newsworthy.
The training was rigorous. The reporters were all amateurs when they came to work, but the rewrite men
were professionals, accustomed to teaching in a hard school.
One graduate was Kurt Vonnegut
. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era:
A legendary story held that a young reporter who called in a story of the slaying of an infant was sent back to get the answer to the question, "What color were the dead baby's eyes?" Certainly, all the young reporters were sent back to get more information so that they would learn to get it in the first place. Another watchword: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out with two independent sources."
The City News Bureau had special operations for covering elections in Chicago and Cook County
, providing regular updates precinct by precinct years before such coverage was common. A similar service reported on the scores of most high-school games in Chicago, but otherwise there was no sports coverage.
The film
Call Northside 777
, in which James Stewart
plays a reporter whose articles free an innocent man from prison, was based on a story that originated at the City News Bureau.
The City News Bureau broke the story of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre
in 1929, but, for once, didn't quite believe its reporter, Walter Spirko, and sent the following bulletin:
Spirko continued as a Chicago reporter for many years, breaking a story of thieving policemen known as the Summerdale police scandal.
Playwright
Charles MacArthur
, co-author of the play The Front Page
was a former City Press reporter; several of the characters in the play were based on City Press personalities, notably the skittish managing editor Larry Mulay. Other well-known alumni: syndicated columnist and Politico editor Roger Simon
, reclusive media mogul Fred Eychaner, environmental journalist William Allen, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh
, New York Times columnist David Brooks
, author of Bobos in Paradise
, pop art
ist Claes Oldenburg
, consumer
advocate David Horowitz
, columnist Mike Royko
, and Pulitzer Prize
winning editorial cartoon
ist Herbert Lawrence Block, (commonly known as Herblock
).
Other mainstays of the staff of the City News Bureau were Arnold Dornfeld, Paul Zimbrakos and Bernard Judge.
The City News Bureau had three teletype wires, one for the Chicago dailies, one for radio and television stations, and one for press releases. In addition, it owned a pneumatic tube
system that connected all the Chicago dailies, including those that no longer existed.
As Chicago went down to only two daily newspapers, the City News Bureau slowly faded and was reduced to a minor operation though it was still widely used by both Chicago-based newspapers, the Chicago Tribune
and the Chicago Sun-Times
until the Sun-Times decided to pull out of the joint ownership agreement it had inherited from some the City News Bureau's original owners, for which the Sun-Times was a successor paper. The PR Newswire, which was part of City News was sold; the Sun-Times decided it cost too much to keep City News running, and it was closed after its last dispatch February 28, 1999. Electronic news media—both radio and television—both widely used City News throughout the 1990s, until the Sun-Times, owned by Conrad Black
's Hollinger International, decided to pull out. (After Black was indicted in 2005 on charges of looting Hollinger, some speculated his desire to squeeze cash out of the company's properties helped hasten the demise of the original City News.)
The New City News Service, owned by the Tribune, opened soon thereafter, and soon changed its name to the City News Service. Though smaller, it was still run by Paul Zimbrakos, a 40-plus year employee of the old CNB, and the bureau's last editor, and is still widely used by Chicago-area news media. The Sun-Times management had thought they would be able to create a new, cheaper wire service, staffed with few people. When that venture—called Alliance News—failed, for a while the Sun-Times used the part-time help of Medill News Service, staffed by unpaid journalism students from the Medill School of Journalism
. The Sun-Times, however, was barred from receiving the New City News Service wire because of its being in competition with the Tribune.
Though the Tribune had been hailed by former City Newsers as a savior of CNB, on December 1, 2005, the Tribune informed the 19 employees of City News Service that their jobs were being eliminated as part of cost-cutting measures going on throughout the Tribune Company. (See Associated Press
and other news stories of December 1 & December 2, 2005.) Tribune editors and executives reasoned that CNS was providing the Tribune's competitors' Web sites with news that the paper itself should have exclusively, the better to compete in an age of Internet news distribution.
The City News Service closed at the end of 2005, and was swallowed into a smaller Tribune Internet news operation.
City News lives on, in spirit, at least, at the Sun-Times. In February 2006, the Sun-Times worked to fill the void felt at the city's TV and radio stations by the demise of the old City News by starting its own 24-hour newswire, the STNG Wire. The key to the operation, staffed by veterans of both the original and the Tribune-run City News, is the Daybook, the invaluable daily listing of press conferences, court activity and other events throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, which is shared with subscribers and the Sun Times News Group family. The STNG wire also covers the blood and guts news—the fires, murders, shootings, stabbings, automobile accidents—that City News was known for, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, or City Press, was a news bureau
News bureau
A News bureau is an office for gathering or distributing news. Similar terms are used for specialized bureaus, often to indicate geographic location or scope of coverage: a ‘Tokyo bureau’ refers to a given news operation's office in Tokyo; foreign bureau is a generic term for a news office set up...
that served as one of the first cooperative
Cooperative
A cooperative is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit...
news agencies in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. It was founded in the late 19th century by the newspapers of Chicago to provide a common source of local and breaking news and also used by them as a training ground for new reporters. Hundreds of reporters have "graduated" from the City News Bureau into newspaper dailies - both local and national - or other avenues of writing.
The City News Bureau had reporters in all important news sites, courthouses, Chicago City Hall
Chicago City Hall
Chicago City Hall is the official seat of government of the City of Chicago in Illinois. Adjacent to the Richard J. Daley Center and the James R...
, the County Building, Criminal Court
Courthouse Place
Courthouse Place, also known as the Cook County Criminal Court Building, is a Richardsonian Romanesque-style building at 54 West Hubbard Street in the Near North Side of Chicago. Designed by architect Otto H. Matz and completed in 1893, the build stands on the prior location of a public market...
s, as well as having as many as ten police reporters on duty. It operated around the clock and all year round. The reporters, though young, worked in competition with some of the best reporters in the country, working on the same stories as all the others, questioning politicians and police, and fighting for scoops.
They covered every single death reported to the coroner
Coroner
A coroner is a government official who* Investigates human deaths* Determines cause of death* Issues death certificates* Maintains death records* Responds to deaths in mass disasters* Identifies unknown dead* Other functions depending on local laws...
's office, every important meeting, every news conference, every court case that had once been a news story, even if the trial wasn't newsworthy.
The training was rigorous. The reporters were all amateurs when they came to work, but the rewrite men
Rewrite man
The rewrite man is a newspaper reporter who works in the office, not on the street, taking information reported by others and crafting it into stories. It is rarely used as an actual title. The term rewrite man is something of a misnomer. Some are women, of course. Rewrite men do not just...
were professionals, accustomed to teaching in a hard school.
One graduate was Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era:
- "Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they’d send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they’d run our stories. So that’s what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time."
A legendary story held that a young reporter who called in a story of the slaying of an infant was sent back to get the answer to the question, "What color were the dead baby's eyes?" Certainly, all the young reporters were sent back to get more information so that they would learn to get it in the first place. Another watchword: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out with two independent sources."
The City News Bureau had special operations for covering elections in Chicago and Cook County
Cook County, Illinois
Cook County is a county in the U.S. state of Illinois, with its county seat in Chicago. It is the second most populous county in the United States after Los Angeles County. The county has 5,194,675 residents, which is 40.5 percent of all Illinois residents. Cook County's population is larger than...
, providing regular updates precinct by precinct years before such coverage was common. A similar service reported on the scores of most high-school games in Chicago, but otherwise there was no sports coverage.
The film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
Call Northside 777
Call Northside 777
Call Northside 777 is a documentary-style film noir directed by Henry Hathaway. It is based on the true story of a Chicago reporter who proved that a man, who had been in prison for murder, was wrongly convicted 11 years before....
, in which James Stewart
James Stewart (actor)
James Maitland Stewart was an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive voice and his everyman persona. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime...
plays a reporter whose articles free an innocent man from prison, was based on a story that originated at the City News Bureau.
The City News Bureau broke the story of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre
St. Valentine's Day massacre
The Saint Valentine's Day massacre is the name given to the 1929 murder of 7 mob associates as part of a prohibition era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by Bugs Moran. Former members of the...
in 1929, but, for once, didn't quite believe its reporter, Walter Spirko, and sent the following bulletin:
- Six men are reported to have been seriously injured . . .
Spirko continued as a Chicago reporter for many years, breaking a story of thieving policemen known as the Summerdale police scandal.
Playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
Charles MacArthur
Charles MacArthur
Charles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright and screenwriter.-Biography:Charles MacArthur was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. He early developed a passion for reading...
, co-author of the play The Front Page
The Front Page
The Front Page is a hit Broadway comedy about tabloid newspaper reporters on the police beat, written by one-time Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur which was first produced in 1928.-Synopsis:...
was a former City Press reporter; several of the characters in the play were based on City Press personalities, notably the skittish managing editor Larry Mulay. Other well-known alumni: syndicated columnist and Politico editor Roger Simon
Roger Simon (journalist)
This article is about the columnist and journalist; not to be confused with the conservative writer Roger L. Simon.Roger Simon is the chief political columnist of Politico, who has won more than three dozen first-place awards for journalism, and is the only person to win twice the American Society...
, reclusive media mogul Fred Eychaner, environmental journalist William Allen, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh
Seymour Myron Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters...
, New York Times columnist David Brooks
David Brooks (journalist)
David Brooks is a Canadian-born political and cultural commentator who considers himself a moderate and writes for the New York Times...
, author of Bobos in Paradise
Bobos in Paradise
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There is a book by David Brooks, first published in 2000. The word bobo, Brooks's most famous coinage, is a portmanteau of the words bourgeois and bohemian. The term is used by Brooks to describe the 1990s descendants of the yuppies...
, pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
ist Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
, consumer
Consumer
Consumer is a broad label for any individuals or households that use goods generated within the economy. The concept of a consumer occurs in different contexts, so that the usage and significance of the term may vary.-Economics and marketing:...
advocate David Horowitz
David Horowitz (consumer advocate)
David Horowitz is an American consumer advocate and former reporter for KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, whose Emmy-winning TV program Fight Back! would warn viewers about defective products, test advertised claims to see if they were true, and confront corporations about customer complaints...
, columnist Mike Royko
Mike Royko
Michael "Mike" Royko was a newspaper columnist in Chicago, who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary...
, and Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
winning editorial cartoon
Editorial cartoon
An editorial cartoon, also known as a political cartoon, is an illustration containing a commentary that usually relates to current events or personalities....
ist Herbert Lawrence Block, (commonly known as Herblock
Herblock
Herbert Lawrence Block, commonly known as Herblock , was an American editorial cartoonist and author best known for his commentary on national domestic and foreign policy from a liberal perspective.-Career:...
).
Other mainstays of the staff of the City News Bureau were Arnold Dornfeld, Paul Zimbrakos and Bernard Judge.
The City News Bureau had three teletype wires, one for the Chicago dailies, one for radio and television stations, and one for press releases. In addition, it owned a pneumatic tube
Pneumatic tube
Pneumatic tubes are systems in which cylindrical containers are propelled through a network of tubes by compressed air or by partial vacuum...
system that connected all the Chicago dailies, including those that no longer existed.
As Chicago went down to only two daily newspapers, the City News Bureau slowly faded and was reduced to a minor operation though it was still widely used by both Chicago-based newspapers, the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
and the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
until the Sun-Times decided to pull out of the joint ownership agreement it had inherited from some the City News Bureau's original owners, for which the Sun-Times was a successor paper. The PR Newswire, which was part of City News was sold; the Sun-Times decided it cost too much to keep City News running, and it was closed after its last dispatch February 28, 1999. Electronic news media—both radio and television—both widely used City News throughout the 1990s, until the Sun-Times, owned by Conrad Black
Conrad Black
Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, OC, KCSG, PC is a Canadian-born member of the British House of Lords, and a historian, columnist and publisher, who was for a time the third largest newspaper magnate in the world. Lord Black controlled Hollinger International, Inc...
's Hollinger International, decided to pull out. (After Black was indicted in 2005 on charges of looting Hollinger, some speculated his desire to squeeze cash out of the company's properties helped hasten the demise of the original City News.)
The New City News Service, owned by the Tribune, opened soon thereafter, and soon changed its name to the City News Service. Though smaller, it was still run by Paul Zimbrakos, a 40-plus year employee of the old CNB, and the bureau's last editor, and is still widely used by Chicago-area news media. The Sun-Times management had thought they would be able to create a new, cheaper wire service, staffed with few people. When that venture—called Alliance News—failed, for a while the Sun-Times used the part-time help of Medill News Service, staffed by unpaid journalism students from the Medill School of Journalism
Medill School of Journalism
The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications is a constituent school of Northwestern University which offers both undergraduate and graduate programs. It has consistently been one of the top-ranked schools in Journalism in the United States...
. The Sun-Times, however, was barred from receiving the New City News Service wire because of its being in competition with the Tribune.
Though the Tribune had been hailed by former City Newsers as a savior of CNB, on December 1, 2005, the Tribune informed the 19 employees of City News Service that their jobs were being eliminated as part of cost-cutting measures going on throughout the Tribune Company. (See Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
and other news stories of December 1 & December 2, 2005.) Tribune editors and executives reasoned that CNS was providing the Tribune's competitors' Web sites with news that the paper itself should have exclusively, the better to compete in an age of Internet news distribution.
The City News Service closed at the end of 2005, and was swallowed into a smaller Tribune Internet news operation.
City News lives on, in spirit, at least, at the Sun-Times. In February 2006, the Sun-Times worked to fill the void felt at the city's TV and radio stations by the demise of the old City News by starting its own 24-hour newswire, the STNG Wire. The key to the operation, staffed by veterans of both the original and the Tribune-run City News, is the Daybook, the invaluable daily listing of press conferences, court activity and other events throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, which is shared with subscribers and the Sun Times News Group family. The STNG wire also covers the blood and guts news—the fires, murders, shootings, stabbings, automobile accidents—that City News was known for, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Further reading
- Dornfeld, Arnold; Behind the Front Page: The Story of the City News Bureau of Chicago (1983) ISBN 0-89733-070-6
External links
- Reminiscences of CNB gathered by the Headline Club of Chicago
- Chronology of Kurt Vonnegut
- A reminiscence of CNB in the 1990s. The murder mentioned was at the Jarvis "L' Stop on the Chicago Transit Authority's Howard/Red Line.
- Claes Oldenburg biography.
- AP story on City News Service closing.
- City News Bureau Records, Online Inventory, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois