City News Bureau of Chicago (CNB), or City Press (1890–2005), was a news bureau that served as one of the first cooperative news agencies in the United States. It was founded in 1890 by the newspapers of Chicago to provide a common source of local and breaking news and also used by them as a training ground for new reporters, described variously as "journalism's school of hard knocks" or "the reporter's boot camp." Hundreds of reporters "graduated" from the City News Bureau into newspaper dailies—both local and national—or other avenues of writing.
Operations
The City News Bureau had reporters in all important news sites, courthouses, Chicago City Hall, the County Building, Criminal Courts, as well as having as many as ten police reporters on duty. It operated around the clock and all year round. The reporters, though young, worked in competition with some of the best reporters in the country, working on the same stories as all the others, questioning politicians and police, and fighting for scoops.
They covered every single death reported to the coroner's office, every important meeting, every news conference, every court case that had once been a news story, even if the trial wasn't newsworthy.
The training was rigorous. The reporters were all amateurs when they came to work, but the rewrite men were professionals, accustomed to teaching in a hard school. Turnover was rapid at CNB as reporters eagerly sought newspaper jobs as soon as they felt they had paid their dues in CNB trenches.
One graduate was Kurt Vonnegut. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era: "I'm very proud I worked there. It was like being a soldier."
"Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they’d send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they’d run our stories. So that’s what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time."
A legendary story held that a young reporter who called in a story of the slaying of an infant was sent back to get the answer to the question, "What color were the dead baby's eyes?" Certainly, all the young reporters were sent back to get more information so that they would learn to get it in the first place. Another watchword: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out with two independent sources" or "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
The City News Bureau had special operations for covering elections in Chicago and Cook County, providing regular updates precinct by precinct years before such coverage was common. A similar service reported on the scores of most high-school games in Chicago, but otherwise there was no sports coverage.
The film Call Northside 777, in which James Stewart plays a reporter whose articles free an innocent man from prison, was based on a story that originated at the City News Bureau.
The City News Bureau broke the story of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, but, for once, didn't quite believe its reporter, Walter Spirko, and sent the following bulletin: Six men are reported to have been seriously injured . . .
Spirko continued as a Chicago reporter for many years, breaking a story of thieving policemen known as the Summerdale police scandal.
The City News Bureau didn't always confine its scoops to local stories. One momentous non-local event originated on a quiet Sunday in 1941, when a reporter at the Damen Avenue police station on the city's near-northwest side was slowly twisting a dial on the desk sergeant's short wave radio when he heard toe static-punctuated voice of an amateur radio operator telling another "ham" that "bombs are falling all over Honolulu." The eavesdropping reporter could hear explosions in the background of the radio transmission. He phoned what he had heard to his city editor, who immediately sent bulletins to the CNB's four major newspapers and the member of the Associated Press. It caught the AP by surprise and within seconds the report was on news wires worldwide. CNB was the first to break the news of Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbor.
Playwright Charles MacArthur, co-author of the play The Front Page, was a City Press reporter; several of the characters in the play were based on City Press personalities, notably the skittish assistant managing editor Larry Mulay.