By Michael Miner
City News Service made an offer for CNB before Christmas. Faigin and Tom Quinn, who run the LA wire, are both Medill alumni and Quinn worked at CNB when he was starting out. But their credentials were more impressive than their original terms. “I have received no serious offers,” Joe Leonard, the Tribune associate editor who’s president of the CNB board, told me the other day.
“I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the news directors. They’re a splendid crowd of people,” said Whitfield. “I reported the results to City News Bureau, and it came as a complete shock to me when a reporter from the Daily Herald called and said the bureau would close on March 1.
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Where can you save money? I asked him.
Faigin’s a little skeptical of a news report that arrives–as he puts it–by E-mail. “For subscribers to pay attention it has to be right up in front of you at all times, coming in on a constant stream. People check their E-mail every couple of hours. If you’re a professional wire service you have to be acting like one.”
“You see, the media in Northern Ireland had lost the respect of the community. And the community turned to the people who were out on the street for their news–people politically motivated to foment violence. How much better it would have been to have been able to send a live report from Unity Flats in Belfast that afternoon. I let them down that afternoon–and it was a lesson underlined that night when the guns came out and people were killed.
