About City News Bureau of Chicago

City News Bureau of Chicago

The City News Bureau of Chicago, known for most of its life simply as City News or City Press, was a cooperative local news agency founded in 1890 by the competing newspapers of Chicago. For 115 years it served as the city's common tripwire: its young reporters covered police stations, courts, City Hall, the coroner's office, fires, accidents and murders around the clock, and filed copy that Chicago's newspapers, and later its radio and television stations, ran under their own mastheads.

It was also American journalism's most famous training ground — described as journalism's school of hard knocks and as the reporter's boot camp. Hundreds of reporters graduated from City News to dailies in Chicago and nationally and to other kinds of writing. Its alumni included columnist Mike Royko, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, cartoonist Herblock and playwright Charles MacArthur, whose experience there fed into The Front Page.

The original bureau closed after its last dispatch on 28 February 1999, when the Chicago Sun-Times withdrew from joint ownership. A smaller Tribune-owned successor, the City News Service, ran under the bureau's last editor until the end of 2005. The distinction matters: sources that say City News shut down in 1999 are describing the cooperative bureau; sources that say 2005 are describing its successor service.

Founded cooperatively in 1890

In 1890 the publisher Victor Lawson of the Chicago Daily News persuaded his competitors to cooperate in forming the City Press Association, to cover routine local news in common and to train reporters. Renamed the City News Bureau in 1910, it was owned jointly by the city's dailies — five competing newspapers in Chicago's great newspaper age — none of which could afford to let a rival be first with a fire, a verdict or a killing, and all of which could share the cost of watching every routine beat, every hour of the day.

The cooperative logic was the same that lay behind national agencies, applied to a single city. One reporter at a police station, filing for everyone, replaced five reporters duplicating the same watch. The savings funded the breadth: City News could be everywhere, all the time, in a way no single paper's local staff could match. From streetcar messengers in its earliest decades it moved its copy successively by pneumatic tube, teletype and computer.

How the bureau worked

The bureau posted reporters at all the important sources of Chicago news: the courthouses, City Hall, the County Building, the criminal courts, and as many as ten police reporters on duty at a time. It operated around the clock and all year round. Its reporters covered every death reported to the coroner's office, every important meeting, every news conference, and every court case that had once been a news story, following cases through trial even when the proceedings themselves were no longer newsworthy.

Reporters in the field phoned their facts in to rewrite staff at the desk, who turned the called-in material into finished copy and disseminated it to client papers and stations. The bureau ran three teletype wires — one for the Chicago dailies, one for radio and television, and one for press releases — owned a pneumatic tube system running under Chicago's streets to the newspaper offices, and kept a speaker live around the clock on the coded Chicago police radio frequency, so that addresses announced by dispatchers could send City News reporters out immediately. Its daily Daybook, listing upcoming court appearances, press conferences and other scheduled news events across the metropolitan area, became an essential tool for every newsroom that subscribed.

The training ground

City News reporters were, by design, beginners. They arrived as amateurs; the rewrite editors who received their calls were professionals, accustomed to teaching in a hard school. Turnover was rapid because the system was meant to work that way: as soon as young reporters felt they had paid their dues in the City News trenches, they sought, and usually found, jobs on daily newspapers. Low pay and long hours were notorious and, in retrospect, part of the credential.

The pedagogy was verification by humiliation and return trips. Editors sent reporters back to scenes to confirm the smallest detail — legend preserved the trainee dispatched back to ask the colour of a dead baby's eyes — until getting it right the first time became habit. The bureau's famous watchword, quoted here in its usual short form, was: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. That single sentence, originating at City News, became a maxim of American reporting far beyond Chicago.

Alumni: Royko, Vonnegut, Hersh and others

Kurt Vonnegut, who worked at City News in the late 1940s while attending university, described it as a tripwire for all the newspapers in town: the bureau's reporters were out around the clock, and when they hit a genuinely big story — a juicy murder or scandal — the papers sent their own senior reporters and photographers; otherwise they ran City News copy. He said he was very proud to have worked there, comparing it to being a soldier.

The roll is unusually wide for a local wire. Mike Royko, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, wrote that City News taught its reporters to fear nothing on the job except a disappointed editor back at the office. Seymour Hersh credited it with teaching him good and bad reporting and the streets of the city. Other alumni named in histories include David Brooks, Roger Simon, Claes Oldenburg, John Callaway, David Horowitz the consumer advocate, Herblock, editor Russell Freeburg and media owner Fred Eychaner. Actor Melvyn Douglas worked there — and was, by one oft-told account, fired for falling asleep during a big story before going into acting. Charles MacArthur turned his City Press years into The Front Page, co-written with Ben Hecht, with characters modelled on bureau personalities.

Scoops: from the St Valentine's Day Massacre to Pearl Harbor

City News broke the story of the St Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929 — though, in a caution famous in its own lore, the bureau initially hedged its own reporter Walter Spirko's account, bulletining only that six men were reported seriously injured. Spirko remained a Chicago reporter for many years and later broke the Summerdale police scandal, the story of thieving policemen. The bureau's crime coverage was not colour; it was the daily substance of the wire.

Its most remarkable scoop was not local at all. On a quiet Sunday in 1941, a City News reporter at the Damen Avenue police station, idly turning the dial of the desk sergeant's shortwave radio, overheard an amateur radio operator reporting that bombs were falling on Honolulu, with explosions audible in the background. He phoned it to his city editor, who bulletined the bureau's client newspapers and the Associated Press member at once. By that account, City News was first with the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, beating the national wires to one of the century's biggest stories from a Chicago police station.

Elections, courts and the routine record

Not all of the bureau's value was in sensation. It ran special operations for elections in Chicago and Cook County, reporting results precinct by precinct years before such granular coverage was common, and a similar service reported the scores of most Chicago high-school games, although it otherwise carried no sports coverage. It followed the unglamorous continuity of civic life — inquests, arraignments, council meetings, court calendars — that made client papers reliable day after day.

Cultural history repeatedly traces back to its files. The film Call Northside 777, in which James Stewart plays a reporter whose articles free an innocent man, was based on a story that originated at the City News Bureau. The bureau's records, preserved at the Newberry Library, remain a source for historians of Chicago crime, politics and journalism.

Decline as Chicago's newspaper field narrowed

The bureau's strength depended on a city of many dailies sharing one local newsgatherer. As Chicago shrank to two daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, the cooperative rationale weakened and the operation contracted. Its press-release business, PR Newswire, which had been part of City News, was sold off. Costs rose while the client base narrowed to the two papers and the city's broadcasters, who used the service throughout the 1990s.

The end of the original bureau came over price. In 1999, when the service proposed doubling its fees, Chicago's television and radio stations balked; the Sun-Times, then owned by Conrad Black's Hollinger International, decided the bureau cost too much and withdrew from the joint ownership it had inherited as a successor to the original owners. City News Bureau closed after its last dispatch on 28 February 1999. Editor Paul Zimbrakos, who had joined in 1958 and ran the newsroom for decades, presided over the final days of an institution then 109 years old.

The City News Service, 1999–2005

The Chicago Tribune kept the idea alive on its own. It reached a last-minute agreement to continue the service with a smaller staff, still led by Zimbrakos, renamed City News Service — at first styled the New City News Service — as a wholly owned Tribune operation. The Sun-Times's attempt at a cheaper alternative, called Alliance News, failed, and for a time the paper relied on part-time help and on the Medill News Service staffed by Northwestern journalism students; it was barred from taking the Tribune's wire as a competitor.

On 1 December 2005 the Tribune announced the elimination of the service and its 19 jobs at year's end, as part of company-wide cost cutting. Tribune editors reasoned that City News copy was appearing on competitors' websites, and that in an internet-competitive era the paper should keep its reporting for its own print and online products. Employees were offered the chance to apply for 13 positions on the Tribune's expanded 24-hour news desk. City News Service shut down on 31 December 2005, and its functions were absorbed into a smaller Tribune internet news operation. In February 2006 the Sun-Times group launched its own 24-hour STNG Wire, staffed by veterans of both City News incarnations, built around the same Daybook and the same fires, murders and accidents coverage.

Legacy

City News Bureau's afterlife has been educational as well as journalistic. From 2009 Loyola University Chicago's School of Communication offered a City News Bureau course taught by Zimbrakos, who died in 2022, and former CBS bureau chief Jack Smith, explicitly recreating the bureau as a teaching laboratory in how to cover a city's inner workings. A recent book project by bureau veterans, built around the sirens its bulletins answered, returned the institution to print.

For a directory of agencies, City News is the outstanding American example of the local cooperative wire: neither a national giant nor a single paper's bureau, but a shared civic instrument. For 115 years in its two forms, it watched Chicago so that Chicago's media did not each have to watch alone — and in doing so it taught several generations of American journalists, more thoroughly than any classroom, how reporting is done.