Front Page Story: Chicago's City News Office is Shut

American journalism awoke to a new year yesterday without one of its best-known institutions. The Chicago Tribune's City News Service, which trained some of the country's most celebrated writers and provided the hard-bitten, hard-drinking model for the play and film, The Front Page, has filed its last bulletin.

"It taught me how to tell a story," Kurt Vonnegut told Associated Press, about his time working at the City News in the 1940s for $28 (then £7) a week. Among the other skills he picked up, Vonnegut recalled: "I was taught to lie to gain people's confidence on the phone."

The agency, which was the first to break the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was known as the City News Bureau of Chicago for the first 109 years of its existence. It was founded in 1890, when it dispatched breaking stories to newsrooms by messengers using the city tram service, or by cylinders speeding down pneumatic tubes. It was established as a cooperative venture by Chicago's papers to supply them with fast, just-the-facts news stories, and quickly won a reputation for unembroidered accuracy. The newsroom motto was: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

"You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell," Vonnegut told the New York Times. Another City News veteran, Ellen Warren, now a senior correspondent on the Chicago Tribune, recalled the constant demand for detail from her editors. Among the questions she remembers having to ask a weary police sergeant was: "What colour were the offender's pants, tan or khaki green?"

Seymour Hersh, America's most famous investigative journalist, who broke the stories of the My Lai massacre of civilians by US soldiers in Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq, learned the ropes at the City News Bureau.

"You learned about good reporting and bad reporting," Mr Hersh told AP. "I learned about the streets. I saw dead people. I saw things I wouldn't have seen in other jobs." In another interview he said: "I learned to have fun. I certainly learned to drink until four in the morning."

The stereotype of the old-fashioned journalist with a press pass in the brim of his fedora and a bottle of whisky at his elbow owes a lot to the bureau. Charles MacArthur used his experiences from working there to write The Front Page with co-author Ben Hecht. Billy Wilder turned the tale of press cynicism into a film, with Jack Lemmon as ace reporter Hildy Johnson and Walter Matthau as his ruthless editor, Walter Burns.

Ultimately, the City News Service was shut down because the Chicago Tribune, which has owned it since 1999, was fed up with sharing its best stories with its competitors. The agency will be replaced with a 24-hour newsroom supplying only the Tribune's website.

As Paul Zimbrakos, the outgoing editor, put it, the service was shut down because "our work was too good".