By: Mark Fitzgerald Monday, the Chicago Sun-Times launches STNG Wire, a commercial venture designed to appeal to Chicago broadcasters who have been without a reliable Day Book of scheduled news or tips on breaking news since the Chicago Tribune shut down the successor to the legendary City News Bureau last New Year's Eve.
"When we heard Tribune Co. was shutting down City News [Service], we sort of scratched our head for a minute and thought, there may be an opportunity there for...a commercial product," Sun-Times Editor John Barron said Wednesday evening.
The Sun-Times was a partner with Tribune on the old City News Bureau -- the training ground for some 124 years for such legends as Mike Royko and Kurt Vonnegut -- until it left the cooperative in 1999. The Tribune immediately founded the successor City News Service, selling the wire to anyone except the Sun-Times and its sister papers.
But Barron said the tabloid had "cracked the code on City News," and developed a Day Book and other City News-like tips for its own newsroom, Barron added.
STNG Wire is named for the Sun-Times News Group, the new corporate organization of Hollinger International Inc.'s Chicago-area and northwest Indiana cluster of dailies and community papers.
About 10 full- and part-time people have been hired to work on the new wire. They will work out of the Sun-Times newsroom and will be, like the present newsroom employees, members of the Chicago Newspaper Guild. "We worked with the union on this, and kept them in the loop," Barron said. "So the union will get more members out of this."
Several local news outlets including broadcasters have signed for the service, but there names are not yet being released, Barron said. STNG Wire "did a pretty big sell job" early this year, contacting all the City News customers except those owned by Tribune," he said.
"STNG Wire will pretty much be in the City News model centered around the Day Book, with courts and cops, making all the calls to the police districts for crime and traffic accidents," he said. "Where this may be different in some ways from City News is we hope to utilize our sister papers in suburbs a little bit on this, so we hopefully will provide a little more suburban [news]."
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