City News is dead... long live city news

There was big news today, too: new daybooks from the Sun-Times and Tribune--apparently the City News idea is too good to kill.

Briefly, the City News daybook is paid for by subscribers in most news media businesses, who traditionally paid for content they could use in their own stories without attribution in addition to a variety of services that included the daybook, a schedule of what's newsworthy for the coming day that is distributed each morning (If you've ever thought that it seems like the news is the same on all the different channels, one reason is that all the producers are always reading from the same schedule).

Anyway, ever the competitor, now that the Tribune has closed City News Service, the Sun-times has a new daybook up and running and here's the information. Sun Times News Group Daybook:


News can be E-MAILED to STNGwire@suntimes.com
Or FAXED to 312-321-2148
Or MAILED to STNGWire, c/o Chicago Sun-Times, 350 N. Orleans, 9th Floor, Chicago, IL 60654

The STNGwire staff will be available 24 hours a day starting Monday, Feb. 13. The direct phone is 312-321-2147. If this e-mail did not reach the appropriate media contact for your organization, please forward it, or let us know the proper person to contact. If you have questions, call Jeff Mayes at 312-321-2895.

Thank you
Jeff Mayes, STNG Editor
312-321-2895

The Sun-times news really comes to us thanks to Clare Fauke from Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 1--she is planning an upcoming event featuring John Edwards and hotel employees and when she agreed to, in the words of the original City News Bureau, 'check it out.' Thank you Clare.

Meanwhile Mitch Dudek, who worked for Tribune's City News Service, is apparently going to start up a similar effort from Trib Tower. But the fax number we have is the same as the Tribune City Desk fax. So we'll wait to investigate.

I have to go home! More on this later.

The time does get away from you; more tips

Gads, the time does go past. It sounds so easy, when bloggers tell you, you need to post once a week. I'd say the problem is not finding something to say, but choosing from the rich soup of material.

Just to take one item from the past couple of weeks, we have been doing our regular Professional Media Relations training for about 23 people from across Chicago and suburbs, and last week we had three alumni at different stages in their career come speak about their experiences: Mikki Leventhal from Columbia College Chicago, Mike Burke from Bounce Learning Network, and Marissa Graciosa from Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

All three shared how-to tips; the funniest were Marissa's since she framed them in terms of mistakes she made while learning along the way:

1. Getting bawled out by a reporter for calling her to pitch it at 4 p.m. on a Friday. (Moral: call earlier in the day, earlier in the week)

2. Disposing of dozens of uneaten breakfasts when just 3 people showed up at a breakfast briefing for journalists with ethnic media at 8:30 a.m. on a weekday in the downtown Union League club. (Moral: go meet journalists who work in the neighborhoods in the neighborhoods where they work, or at least close by)

3. Making an enemy out of a reporter in one section of a newspaper by simultaneously pitching a second reporter at the same paper without telling the first one. (Moral: simultaneous pitching without full disclosure is a bad idea).