One sad goddamned story.

There are teams and times and gatherings that can never be replaced or reproduced.

The Inklings. The Founding Fathers. The ’85 Bears. Spinal Tap. “Beatlemania” will never be The Beatles, no matter how ‘amazing’ their ‘simulation’ is. (And it was pretty good back when I went, millions of years ago, before they were down to playing the Italian Heritage Festival of Portland, Maine and New Milford High School gymnasium…)

You get what I mean.

They tumble into the world, incandescently bright with genius, inexplicably wonderful, and then they come apart. Or they just pass, as is the way of all flesh. Or they can’t quite get it up ever again. Or their drummer explodes.

You get what I mean.

However, every now and then, you get to bottle the lightening. Institutionalize the magic and turn a freak of circumstances into a finish school for sorcerers.

Such was the City News Service.

Right this minute I’m listening to NPR – to Seymour Hirsch. Back in my pile of books I have beloved and bedraggled copies of “Player Piano”, “Cat’s Cradle”, “Slapstick” and other well-worn Vonnegutia. I still have columns by Royko yellowing quietly away in drawers and boxes that I disinter and re-post every year or two. And if I were to go out today to rent a favorite, smartly scripted B&W classic packed with the best dialogue goin’, like as not I’d make it “His Girl Friday.”

All of these are the goofy offspring of the City News Service, which, like Earl Williams in HGF, is scheduled to be executed at one minute after midnight at the end of this month.

But unlike Williams, there is no one left that's got a stake in hiding the CNS out in a rolltop, even if it is for motives that one might describe as crass and utterly selfish.

Read on...

Fabled bureau to file final page at year's end

By David Greising
Chief business correspondent
Published December 2, 2005
The Front Page gave way to the Internet age Thursday as the New City News Service checked out.

Dec. 31 will be the last day of operation for the 115-year-old news service where generations of reporters learned the abiding lesson of journalistic skepticism: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Born when buggy whips were still a boom business, the wire service is dying at a time when newspapers seem vulnerable to the latest big new thing: the blog-clogged Internet.

City News was a respected training ground for many of journalism's best-known bylines. They included Charles MacArthur, who went on to co-write "The Front Page," a play that immortalized his experiences in the service's no-holds-barred heyday. Columnist Mike Royko, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and novelist Kurt Vonnegut all got their starts there. So did thousands of workaday journalists, including this one.
...

Invented as an armistice for the newspaper wars, City News could not survive an age when newspapers themselves are under siege.

The Web has become a place where newspapers, TV, radio, podcasters and blogs all compete. And the Google-ized hype of the moment ordains that in this competition, the oldest of media--newspapers--must lose.

The Tribune saw no point in funding an operation that was creating news content that the Tribune's own competitors needed to compete. The newspaper's owners saw no choice but to pull the plug on City News.

"Our competitors were taking stuff off the City News wire and putting it on their Web sites," explained James O'Shea, the Tribune's managing editor. "In a competitive world, where we need to be much more competitive on the Web, we felt we had to retool our operations and serve Chicago Tribune readers."

...

The irony in all this is that City News' chief mission--the training of young talent--will be all the more needed in this content-mad age. There are other places for wannabe reporters to learn their craft: journalism schools, small newspapers, internships at big newspapers. None can hold its own against the sink-or-swim training ground of City News, a place where hazing was the board of education as colleagues passed down the art of their trade.
...

In my first month, I was covering press conferences about a spree of murders caused by cyanide-laced Tylenol, a story my City News colleague John Rooney first broke. I rode in a limousine while interviewing a mayoral candidate the city's newspapers had barely yet noticed: An African-American congressman named Harold Washington.

I saw my first shot cop and my first dead perp. I also learned, in an era when race seemed to be a factor in news judgment, that certain South Side murders were declared "cheap," and not worth a City News phone call. Virtually every North Side killing was worth a story.

Paul W. Zimbrakos was my boss then, and he is the man, as bureau chief of New City News, who will turn out the light at midnight Dec. 31.

Zimbrakos on Thursday answered phone calls from around the world about the death of a journalistic icon. When I asked him how the years had changed the young journalists who come to him for training, Zimbrakos had a simple yet profound answer.

"They're more intelligent now, but more naive," he said. City News was a place where they taught street smarts. Naivete could not survive.
...

City News wasn’t all naked, drunken fights in Riccardo's bear-baiting pit between Royko and Studs Terkel – tied wrist to wrist, armed only with broken bottles of Tullemore Dew -- over who got to claim Roger Ebert’s tender young ass.

I was never there so I cannot say for certain that that ever actually happened, nor can I attest as to whether or not Seymore Hersch ever really chased Irv Kupcinet through Billy Goat’s, riding him to ground on a Giant Sumatran Rat like a Cossack before it became an SNL punchline and got franchised.

The bar, not the rat.

I also never went to J-school, but I can tell good writing from bad, and that’s what good journalism is, pure and simple.

Research, investigation, shitty food and developing contacts. Well, accreting them, really. Slowly. Over time. Until you know the players, and can tell the Pure Quill from pure swill.

It’s about planting your feet and deciding you don’t give a shit about who’s in the White House or the Governor’s Mansion on the Fifth Floor of City Hall, because they owe you the truth. The truth is your land and castle. Period. And if big shots don’t want to give up your property, you are gonna damned well dope a way to take it away from them.

And then you’re going to build one helluva finely-chiseled 500 word epic about it that’ll make women swoon and move strong men to tears. Or the other way around.

And then, like as not, you’re gonna to go get smashed.

And yes, it’s comedy, but it sounded a lot like this (from “His Girl Friday”):

Walter: Certainly. We'll crucify that mob. We'll keep Williams under cover until morning so the Post can break the story exclusive. Then we'll let the Governor in on the capture. Share the glory with him.

Hildy (warming up to it): I get it. I get it.

Walter: You've kicked over the whole City Hall like an applecart. You've got the Mayor and Hartwell backed up against a wall. You put one administration out and another one in. This isn't just a newspaper story, Hildy. It's a career. And you standin' there bellyache-ing about whether you're catchin' an eight o'clock train or a nine o'clock train.

Hildy: Well, Walter, I never figured it that way.

Walter: You're still a doll-faced hick, that's why.

Hildy: Gee, we'd be the white-haired boys, won't we?

Walter: Sure, they'll be naming streets after you. Hildy Johnson Street. There'll be statues of ya in the park. The movies will be after ya. The radio. By tomorrow morning, I'll betcha there's a Hildy Johnson cigar. I can see the billboards now. They say, 'Light up with Hildy Johnson.'

Hildy: Oh Walter, will you stop that acting!...We got a lot to do.

Walter: Now you're talking.

I can think of no time in modern history when we needed this journalistic boot-camp more than right now – this minute – both for the skills it taught, and the sensibilities it imparted.

And now it’s gone. And it matters.

Which is what makes this one sad goddamned story.