It's -30- for New City News Service, which in journalism parlance means the end of the story.
The news service that had its heyday in the Front Page era of Chicago journalism will cease operations Jan. 1, with owner Chicago Tribune folding many of its news gathering activities into its own 24-hour Internet-based news operation.
The Tribune's decision to eliminate the 19 City News positions was part of a larger set of cutbacks at the newspaper expected throughout the course of the day.
James E. O'Shea, the Tribune's managing editor, told the City News staff at a 9 a.m. Thursday meeting that 13 new positions would open on the Tribune's 24-hour Internet-based news operation. Former City News employees were told they would be welcome to apply for work, according to Paul W. Zimbrakos, bureau chief of City News.
City News was a respected training ground for many of Chicago journalism's best-known bylines, including columnists Mike Royko and Michael Sneed, and for novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Countless other workaday journalists learned their craft abiding by the news service's legendary mantra of skepticism: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
Among the agency's many "scoops," it was the first to report the death of Harold Washington, and the first to let readers know in the fall of 1982 that a series of mysterious deaths in Chicago's suburbs was due to cyanide-tainted Tylenol, a murder spree that never was solved.
But the news service, founded in a rare cooperative measure by Chicago's five major newspapers in 1890, had outlived its economic purpose of economically gathering news of local crimes, fires, and politics to be shared by the owners and sold to radio and television outlets. The Tribune took over sole ownership of City News six years ago when its last newspaper partner, the Chicago Sun-Times, withdrew funding.
But at a time when every news outlet has its own Web site, the Tribune decided that City News had become a competitive disadvantage.
"Our competitors were taking stuff off the City News wire and putting it on their Web sites," explained O'Shea. "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."
In a near-empty office at 11:12 a.m. Thursday, Zimbrakos, manager of City News, looked over the service's key report: a 14-page "Day Book" that tells of any press conference, major court cases, conventions and key politicians' local schedules.
A local broadcast outlet called to find out if the "Day Book" still would be published, and Zimbrakos told the caller that it, too, would cease to exist.
