SAVE CITY NEWS

Chicago will have to expunge a word from it's dictionary at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2006: Scrappiness.

And yes, that is a word. And, yes, it is 12:01 a.m. not 12:01 p.m.

The idea of scrappiness originates from the New City News Service, an institution in Chicago journalism for the last century. And this idea will disappear when the service, formerly known as City News Service, electronically sends out it's last story on it's news wire sometime late that Saturday night. The service will be halted because the Chicago Tribune, who owns the City News Service (CNS), is cutting back on some jobs. There was something about CNS providing too much competition with the Trib's internet news services.

City News will define scrappiness for another 12 days but then after that, it will be hard to find some other source to take up that title. CNS has been an historic (yes, it's 'an' rather than 'a') training ground for journalists for decades. Mike Royko, Seymour Hirsch and Kurt Vonnegut were all alum and can credit CNS with catapalting their careers as a columnist, investigative reporter and novelist, respectively. Maybe catapalting would be too yellow a term for these journalists but they can at least say, "Yeah, City News taught me a few things." One of those things would be the importance of checking and rechecking facts. A CNS motto that emobies this principle is, "If your mother says she loves you, kick her in the shins and and tell her to prove it."

That's scrappiness.

And so would City Newsers racing around the city, beating five other newspapers, four t.v. news crews and a 24-hour radio news station to the scenes of breaking stories. Fires, police-involved shootings, bad car accidents, press conferences, etc. One legend has it that one reporter was passed on a tip from the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office that someone was murdered in an apartment building on the northern tip of Sheridan Road where only a month earlier someone else was found murdered a floor below. That reporter called up the kind, grandpa-like Rogers Park District (24) captain who told him that there was a crime scene investigation van sent to that Sheridan Road apartment building. Well to make a long story short, that reporter got to the apartment building before even the freelance videographer with multiple police and fire scanners in his car could (Check future editions of the Picayune for the full story).

Times like that were how CNS, a not-for-profit organization since it's restructuring in 1999 when it was revived by the Tribune, educated it's reporters in the old school methods of fact-finding. City Newsers wouldn't Google some address of a fire, they would know the general area after studying their official city street guide and be able to tell you the right way to get there. City Newswers wouldn't call up a random detective from Area 3 , which emcompasses the Rogers Park neighborhood, and ask about another murder in the aforementioned apartment building. They would shoot the shit with the 24th District captain and then bait him with, "Any investigations going on?"

The Tribune will be losing out on a great source of scrappy reporters who truly know the city when CNS stops broadcasting. All other news outlets will also be without the nitty-gritty, just-the-facts-maam, everyday dolldrums of reporting that followed the smaller crimes and kept track of bigger criminals all the way through the judicial process. All will be losing very cheap labor that does all the dirty work of hanging out in police stations and bond court hearings at 26th and California to know what's going on.

My 11 months there, though ill-fated, were some of the most formative and education of my life. I don't regret them at all.

It's too bad some other news agency, say Medill News Service or some other institution, can't pick up the work of CNS. If this newswire was saved, people would still be able to trace knowledge and scrappy reporters back to their home at CNS.