CHICAGO — This may be the quintessential City News story: An editor orders a reporter to find a way into the house of a missing girl and says he doesn't care if the guy has to set the place on fire to do it. A few minutes later, the reporter rushes in behind firefighters after a pile of newspapers mysteriously catches fire on the porch.
Or maybe it is the story about the reporter who was on a police station phone with an editor when he was shoved up against a wall by a gunman who had stormed the place. After the cops killed the gunman, the reporter resumed his conversation with, "Now, as I was saying before the interruption . . . "
At the end of this month, the news service that spawned those stories and countless others — not to mention the axiom "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out" — is set to shut down.
The Chicago Tribune, which owns the City News Service, decided to eliminate it and its 19 jobs to cut costs and to stop serving up news to the newspaper's online and broadcast competitors. City News will be replaced with a 24-hour news desk to serve the Tribune's Web sites only.
There is talk about efforts to save the news service, the successor to the legendary cooperative news service called the City News Bureau of Chicago. But if the decision to shut it down stands, it will mark the end of a journalism institution that since its founding in 1890 has provided breaking news via streetcar messengers, pneumatic tubes, Teletype machines and finally computers.
Chances are you have never heard of City News. But the country is littered with journalists, writers and others who once were City News cub reporters. Newspaper columnist Mike Royko worked there. So did investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
Playwright Charles MacArthur worked there, and with Ben Hecht turned his experiences into "The Front Page." Actor Melvyn Douglas worked there. "Cheers" actor George Wendt wanted to, but a City News staffer found out he couldn't type and advised him to forget about filling out a job application.
Kurt Vonnegut learned his trade by calling in dispatches to City News, such as the one he phoned in after seeing the body of a man who had been squashed by an elevator.
"It taught me how to tell a story," said the author, who worked at City News in the late 1940s, pulling down $28 a week.
Vonnegut recalls being told by a staffer to get more information from a just-widowed woman — a story he recalled in his book "Slaughterhouse-Five."
"Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department," Vonnegut wrote the staffer told him. "Say you have some bad news. Give her the news, and see what she says."
Which is what Vonnegut did.
"I was taught to lie to gain people's confidence on the phone," Vonnegut recalled, chuckling at the memory.
The job was certainly not for the meek. City News was the kind of tough place that former staffers like Vonnegut talk about the way military veterans talk about boot camp.
Hersh recalled the time he was ordered to telephone the family of a girl who had been killed in a plane crash to get a photograph of the victim, only to learn that the family had not yet been notified.
"I call up the mom, this is like Christmas, and tell her her daughter is dead," Hersh said.
But that wasn't the end of the story. An hour later, Hersh was back on the phone, telling the family the girl wasn't dead at all, that it had all been a mistake.
"After that you can do anything," he said.
Reporters were also expected to collect a seemingly endless number of details from police officers, medical examiners, firefighters and lawyers, whether they felt like talking or not.
There was the reporter who turned in a story about a child who swallowed a Christmas ornament. "And the rewrite sent him back, asking him to find out what color the ornament was," said Paul Zimbrakos, who joined the news service in 1958 and is now the bureau chief.
David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, got his first real job out of college there.
"The first thing I remember of course was being told I was a (expletive) idiot over and over again," said Brooks, a City News staffer in the early 1980s. "'You mean you didn't get the color of the corpse's socks, you (expletive) idiot?"'
City News over the years broke its share of stories. It was the first to report that Chicago Mayor Harold Washington had died in 1987, Zimbrakos said.
Legend has it that the City News reported the bombing of Pearl Harbor first because somebody — a staffer or neighbor of a staffer — heard about it on a short-wave radio.
"Everyone else thought it was an Orson Welles kind of hoax, or misinterpretation of some naval maneuvers in Hawaii," wrote A. A. Dornfeld, a longtime City News editor, in his 1983 book "Behind the Front Page." The Associated Press could not confirm the story, but City News ran with it. Fifteen minutes later, the bombing was verified, Dornfeld wrote.