Lying was the only unpardonable sin. Virtually every other failing was permitted–particularly by the eccentric lifers who trained and often traumatized the thousands of young “apprentice reporters” who have learned their trade at the City News Bureau of Chicago during the past 108 years.
But liars were weeded out. Journalists aren’t supposed to lie. It was considered a fatal flaw.
When questioned about a fact in a story, an honorable but in-the-dark apprentice learned that the only way out was to merely admit: “I don’t know.”
Having confessed the sin, the apprentice was given a predictable penance: “Go find out.”
Hence something seems to be missing from the unexpected announcements last week by the Tribune and Sun-Times of the closing of City News around March 1 of next year.
According to Sun-Times executive editor and City News board member Larry Green, the wire service–co-owned by the newspapers–and relying on subscriptions paid by other media, lost about $1 million last year and projections were it would continue to lose money for the next three or four years.
“A lot of beloved institutions are not here anymore,” Green told the New York Times. “This town once had many newspapers. It’s down to two. A lot of those newspapers weren’t making money, so they went out of business. And that’s what happened to the City News Bureau. This isn’t a charitable institution.”
A million dollars is not chump change. We can train a fighter pilot for $1 million, or at least that used to be the rule of thumb.
Or we can train 50 reporters.
On the other hand, I cannot think of an institution more charitable than the City News Bureau of Chicago, even though I haven’t been yelled at there for decades. Surely it deserved the common courtesies–layoffs, cutbacks, some attempt at salvage.
I grew up at City News in the 1960s, working part-time, summers, every conceivable holiday, through high school, college and graduate school. Starting as a copy kid, the typical purple-ink stained wretch with one ear perpetually cocked to the police codes barking from a radio speaker, I dutifully memorized my “Leonard’s Vest Pocket Street Guide of Chicago,” ran for sandwiches and coffee and the various editions of the four Chicago papers, and had vivid nightmares featuring the fearsome Arnold Dornfeld, the legendary night city editor for more than 40 years who considered stupidity a personal insult and who would have been homicidal without that heart of gold.
We remained friends until his death at 84 in 1991. Dornie once confessed his secret: “Laddie, I want ’em much more terrified of me than anything they’ll ever encounter out there in the street.”
That gave City News a certain sense of urgency. Unlike other institutions of higher learning, City News alums wear no class rings, bellow no school songs, and have been able to get together only once so far for a reunion–and that was for having survived a century.
On the other hand, there always have been other tangible rewards: a paycheck, a byline, a career. The value of the place has never been external–Chicagoans never heard of City News unless it made a mistake. Its job was to serve as a tip service for breaking news.
Nor should the importance of these roles be minimized. The high level of competitive journalism that always has distinguished Chicago from other cities has been maintained, at least in part, by the support of lowly apprentices who willingly did all the routine scutwork, covered the humdrum and dutifully backed up their more established colleagues.
That said, the real point of the place has always been internal.
City News was famous for its role as a trade school for journalists. It always has been unique–a sweatshop where neophytes were allowed to make the mistakes they all must inevitably make on their way to becoming professionals. And they even got paid, albeit a pittance, in the process.
“I came out of journalism school aware that I didn’t know how to ask an intelligent question,” remembers veteran Tribune foreign correspondent, economics specialist and senior writer R.C. Longworth, who worked at City News in 1957 and 1958.
“At City Press, a young reporter must interview people at the one moment in their lives when they least want to talk to a reporter. And you must ask all the questions to get the story right and then get out fast before the door slams in your face.”
“Whether you spend the rest of your life on the police beat or interviewing presidents and prime ministers, these are the basic techniques that you use every day of your career,” said Longworth, who nowadays uses those techniques on projects like his new book, “Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First-World Nations.”
His bosses were Dornfeld and Dornfeld’s protege, Mike Royko, who went on to do other things. “How’s that for a one-two punch?” Longworth marvels still.
In the months to come, colleagues will compete with wacky anecdotes and sentiment about “journalism’s boot camp,” the school of hard knocks, the Front Page tradition. Most of us never worked harder in our lives or ever had more fun. Even novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who did a stint in the mid-1940s, reacted to the news with shock: “I’m prouder of that than anything I ever did,” he told the Tribune’s Peter Kendall and Monica Davey, City News alumni.
The loss will not be apparent immediately, but will be subtler, deeper and more permanent. It was Kendall, for instance, who led the reporting team that dug beneath the obvious to question the credibility of Chicago “scientist” Richard Seed who gained the world’s attention last winter by announcing that he wanted to be the first to clone people.
Tribune readers, thus, knew not to wait up nights clinging to every word Seed said. But other media continued for two weeks to give Seed the platform he sought, without ever questioning his credentials.
Thus, much more disturbing to people like me, is the loss of the justification for a place like City News, the loss of a sense of journalism as a calling, which most journalists still believe it to be.
Nobody was more sure of it than my 1960s dayside city editor, Larry Mulay, a marvelous and dedicated obsessive-compulsive cleanliness freak who began each day by washing down his desk with benzene. Dornfeld, the night city editor, was not particularly tidy.
“We want our reporters to be very objective–and persevering,” Mulay once wrote in notes for another editor who had to make a speech. “They must be fair, unprejudiced, not become emotionally or otherwise involved. They must be clean-cut, no beards, mustaches, long hair and hippie dress. Fresh businessman appearance, and clean attitude. We want them neutral in every respect, nationality-wise, non-political, non-racial.”
Personal quirks aside, Mulay listed many traits of a good journalist and he was a good teacher. The night shift was somewhat tougher. Crime erupted at night. So did Dornfeld.
“Chum, spare me the metaphors and similes,” he used to snarl whenever I tried to push the City News creativity envelope even the tiniest bit. “I want the facts. How many are dead? What hospitals were they taken to? What happened? Who says so? Stick with the news. Anything fancier just makes my piles bleed.”
