Posted by chicagomedia.org on August 12, 2009 at 08:25:16:
City News veterans back on teaching beat
Phil Rosenthal
Tribune Media
August 12, 2009
Those whose indoctrination into journalism came through Chicago's old City News Bureau tend to speak of it the way Marines recall their time at Parris Island.
It was demanding and draining, but many who survived said the rigorous standards drilled into them there made them stronger, sharper and better equipped for the challenges ahead than those trained elsewhere.
"I spent 48 years at City News, and most of the time was spent teaching," said Paul Zimbrakos, who started as a copy boy in 1958 and turned out the lights at the end of 2005 on the last vestige of the 115-year-old institution as editor of what had become New City News. "When we hired kids coming out of [journalism] school, they really lacked schooling in [street reporting]. We had to teach them from the bottom up. We had to teach them the basics. ... You'd be surprised at the lack of tutoring the kids have in covering breaking news stories."
Beginning this fall, Zimbrakos and fellow City News alumnus Jack Smith will invoke the spirit and standards of the old news service -- if not its killer hours and workload -- with a new class at Loyola University Chicago's School of Communications. Up to 15 students will be chasing stories around the city at their direction with their dispatches made available through chitowndailynews.org.
"We're going to do the same thing that we did at the old City News," Zimbrakos said. "We're going to teach the kids street reporting, breaking news reporting, give them some rewrite and some editing experiences. ... We're just aiming to get the kids' feet wet in street reporting."
City News went away almost four years ago, six years after the Chicago Sun-Times pulled out of the longstanding partnership and left the Chicago Tribune agreeing to pay for a streamlined version. The Tribune folded the news service, which provided major and mundane dispatches to various news outlets, opting instead to focus on its own round-the-clock online operation.
Over the decades, the service broke major stories. It also broke in major talent, including investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, columnist Mike Royko, novelist Kurt Vonnegut and Sun-Times Editor Don Hayner.
That legacy weighs heavily, but the three-credit "City News Bureau of Chicago: Covering Government and Politics in Chicago and Cook County" is not intended to be a history course. Still, Don Heider, dean of Loyola's School of Communication, views it as more than an advanced reporting class.
"Part of what made the bells and whistles go off [when it was proposed] was that one of the things we're not doing a very good job in higher education is teaching people how cities work," Heider said. "There's going to be a healthier dose of civics, especially about Chicago, than there are in most news writing classes."
To teach the students how to get facts about what goes on in the city requires them to learn how the city not only is supposed to work, but how it actually does.
"You can only get so much from police. You can only get so much from the medical examiner," Zimbrakos said. "This is the basis of street reporting, knowing where you can get the information. And of course, the other important aspect is accuracy. This is something we plan to drill into the kids."
Zimbrakos would prefer to keep his age private. ("You can stick in your column that 'he's an old dinosaur,' " he said.) He has spent the last few years since the demise of New City News "contemplating how boring life is [with] a lot of gardening , a lot of reading, a lot of things on the computer, but this is my first venture back into news."
Smith has been lecturing on politics and the press at Loyola in recent years. This is helpful in that he "understands who Loyola students are" and knows they often have outside jobs in addition to being full-time students, according to Heider.
"Our attitude isn't drop everything and do the bureau and that's all you're going to do. We can't make it a 20-hour, 50-hour thing," Heider said. "One of the things Jack and Paul and I have talked about is: What stories will we not send a kid out on that you probably would send a City News reporter out on? They're not fodder. We're conscious of what's safe and what's not."
Speaking of safety, it has not gone unnoticed what is going on in the journalism business these students are being trained to enter. But the lessons and skills can be applied to new media as well as old, to say nothing of other fields.
"One of the things I've learned from teaching almost 20 years is you never know where kids will go," Heider said. "You teach them as best you can and let it roll from there."