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Another lonely mastodon wanders off into the tar pits...

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/print_story.asp?print=1&guid={C8FBEDDD-ECE7-403C-8550-F0D8394D9FDA}&siteid=mktw

Anything but a cheap education
Chicago and journalism lose a storied franchise
By Padraic Cassidy, MarketWatch
Last Update: 3:32 PM ET Dec. 7, 2005

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The most alert time of the shift was 5:30 a.m., heading back to Chicago police headquarters with a list of the newly dead, the recent arrivals at the medical examiner's office. You're a million times more alert than those sleepy commuters on Eisenhower Expressway.

A handful of calls later, working your way backward, looking for the violent or noteworthy deaths, you've rolled back the tape on someone's last few hours in Chicago, relayed in short paragraphs to the rewrite desk.

A good thing, too, because the sun is now up, the morning rush has started, and the odds are good that a school bus, somewhere, is headed toward an accident. That, too, would require phone calls -- names, ages and addresses of victims, please, with hospitals transported to and conditions -- and a rundown to rewrite.

That was a regular part of my City News Bureau shift, for more than a year, anyway. The esteemed training ground for reporters announced last week it would close its doors for good in January, "a victim of Tribune Co. belt tightening," as the rival Chicago Sun-Times put it. It actually was shut down in 1999, but a version of it was reincarnated as City News Service, wholly owned by the Tribune after the Sun-Times, published by Hollinger International Inc., pulled out of the long-running joint venture.

What began in 1890 as a cooperative news-gathering organization and a feeder system for Chicago's papers is the latest to suffer "reorganization," a code word in the news business for fewer reporters.

In its time, the system produced well-known alumni, including the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, novelist Kurt Vonnegut and the famed columnist Mike Royko.

Without romanticizing the place, it's fair to say anything like it probably won't come around again anytime soon.

All told, I put in 2 1/2 years there, walking in green and walking out of its old headquarters at 35 E. Wacker Dr. hardened and hardier.

Night shift

The overnight shift started at about midnight and finished up at 9 a.m. Every night you'd hope to make quick work of the medical examiner's list, tossing aside, or "cheaping," the suicides, naturals and overdoses -- the cases that didn't merit a story.

The shift also began, literally, with a trudge across the Chicago River on the Michigan Avenue Bridge, rain or shine, or snow, for about five copies each of the early editions of the Sun-Times and the Trib, stacked by the security-guard station in the Tribune Tower lobby --papers filled, no doubt, with more stories to chase, midnight hours be damned.

Later in the morning, the stories would be clipped by the managing editor and glued to the dreaded "Scoop Record" slip, in a point-by-point rundown for the day-shift beat reporters, with details underlined to highlight what the newspapers had printed but that you had neglected.

Somewhere after dropping off the newspapers back at the office and the trip to the medical examiner's were four or five hours at police headquarters spent closing out the afternoon shift's unfinished list of M.E. cases, waiting for extra-alarm fires and monitoring the "dep sheet," the typewritten log of major crime investigations. It was compiled one floor below and menacingly parceled out by police officers who wondered what they'd done wrong to now find themselves across a desk from a nettlesome young reporter at 4 a.m.

On busy nights, you could spend hours driving from story to story, gathering details, then finding a working pay phone on which to call them in.

On slow nights, I perfected my napping position in the press room: feet on the long-empty Tribune desk behind me, chair angled back, head propped up by a dictionary, eyes covered by an opened Fraternal Order of Police handbook, right ear inches away from the scanner.

'Check it out'

What did I learn from all that?

Getting the story was paramount, no matter what the weather or time of day. Saying you'd tried to get it was a worse excuse than no excuse at all. Covering a retirement party for a firefighter by phone, for example, was just another assignment, one on an impossibly long list of daily events to cover, with instructions to file stories on all of them.

When I was moved up to rewrite, did I enjoy riding herd on reporters on the street? Let's be honest: Yes. Because, on the food chain of City News, there was still the managing editor to answer to.

But in the office you missed the things you'd seen while on the street: the jewelry courier who cried when telling the cops how his bag was stolen; the guy who used his belt to undo his handcuffs and climb up in the ceiling, only to be knocked down, piñata-style with a broom handle by the less-than-amused detectives; the cops who got in a fistfight and the one who walked up to me right afterward, with a finger in my face, and yelled, "You didn't see anything!"

The preferred method of crime solving was often to round up the usual suspects and lock them in separate rooms for a few hours. The guilty ones always sleep, the cops said.

There are hundreds of other details, all etched into memory: "Stable" is not a condition -- it's "critical," "poor," "fair" or "good." That's it. Addresses on the North Side street Broadway don't take "St." or "Ave." or "Blvd." or any other suffix, it's just Broadway. Don't ever answer an editor's question with, "I assumed." And you're not getting a new reporter's notebook until you show me your old one, with all the pages used up.

Those last few came from CNB editor Paul Zimbrakos, "Zimbo," already in charge for decades by the time I got there in 1991. Back then he was a strict drill sergeant, unwavering in his convictions on how to get the story and, from my point of view, often cruel. It was Zimbo's tireless hounding of young reporters that inspired what I thought was a better motto than the famous "If your mother says she loves you, check it out" line: City News was a great place to be from, as the longtime Chicago Daily News reporter and City News alum Ed Rooney said. Actually having to work there was another matter.

Rooney had another piece of advice I never forgot: Call yourself a reporter, not a journalist. A journalist, he said, is just a name for an unemployed reporter.

But credit City News with this: Since leaving, I've never felt intimidated by any editor or big-ego reporter, or anyone on the other end of a question, because once you've been through the City News experience, you're tough and resourceful. And you've asked the hardest questions in the most awkward places in the most difficult circumstances.

"Anyone who can't write up a seven-car crash shouldn't be in this business," Jack Germond, the columnist for the Baltimore Sun, told me, before I moved to Chicago.

I wanted that, and I got it, along with some highly pragmatic skills: what questions to ask; how to get a subject to answer your question; and, probably most useful of all, how to go back again and again to get the right answer. "You must be from City News," was a common refrain when I phoned the detectives, again.

My time at City News wasn't anything close to glamorous, but it produced a lifetime of good things: I met my wife, who also put in her time there, and many, many good friends. There was even a short-lived band formed from some CNB-ers, named The Cheap M.E.'s.

May they rest in peace.

Padraic Cassidy is a reporter for MarketWatch in New York.