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By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: December 16, 2008
A giant crane topples on the East Side of Manhattan and seven people are killed. A steam pipe explodes near Grand Central Terminal, leaving one passer-by dead, injuring dozens of others and forcing a number of businesses to close. A fire rips through a home in the Bronx, killing 10 members of two immigrant families from West Africa.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Daniel Meyers monitoring scanners for the Breaking News Network, a subscription-based service used mainly by news outlets.
Most people got news of these major New York stories from television, radio, the newspaper or, more and more, the Web.
But some of the first hints that something big was happening came from a series of transmissions from outside the five boroughs. Those messages came from a strip mall in New Jersey and were sent to pagers and computers in newsrooms in New York City and beyond.
The mall is home to a company called the Breaking News Network, started in the early 1990s by twin brothers who were working as electronics salesmen and who believed that journalists eager for a scoop would pay for a pager service that transmitted fragments of conversation culled from radio frequencies used by emergency responders, including police officers and firefighters.
The pager messages are terse, typically containing little more than a street address and a two- or three-word description of what is thought to be happening there. One recent alert was about an apparent car crash in Brooklyn: “Car Vs Bldg | 225a Wyckoff St Brooklyn, NY | 12/3/2008 8:52 a.m.”
Scant as they may be, those bits of information allow reporters and photographers to quickly start heading to the scene, giving them perhaps an advantage over their rivals or maybe allowing them to arrive in time to witness events firsthand.
Inside a sparsely furnished third-floor suite in the strip mall, in Fort Lee, a handful of employees work 24 hours a day, tapping out pager messages surrounded by the raspy crackle and chatter of scanners.
“It’s never a boring job,” one of the company’s founders, Steven Gessman, 49, said in the office where he works with his brother, Robert. “Just sitting here you’ll hear about a bank robbery in Manhattan or a fire in Brooklyn.”
The company, which does not disclose its rates, has subscribers beyond journalists, including public safety officials, insurance adjusters, utility workers, tow truck operators. Many assignment editors at television stations and daily papers consider the pagers a necessity, if only because they know the competition subscribes.
“We don’t have the staff to dedicate one person to just listen to scanners,” said Shannon Troetel, the assignment manager at New York 1, a 24-hour cable news channel based in Manhattan. “We depend on them to be our ears.”
Though the pagers often provide useful clues, they have also been known to send reporters on a wild goose chase — a seemingly horrific traffic accident with many seriously injured turns out to be a fender-bender with no one hurt.
“We do raw news,” said Robert Gessman. “On occasion there’s a report that turns out to be inaccurate, in most cases because the person on the scene gives an inaccurate report on the radio.”
The service relies on hundreds of volunteers and news buffs who listen to scanners at home and call the Fort Lee headquarters when they hear something they think is noteworthy. Among them is Tom Graff, 55, a retired electrician in Gravesend, Brooklyn, who said he often listened to his scanners when he cannot sleep.
“It’s soothing in a way, therapeutic, and it keeps you in tune with what’s going on,” he said “But sometimes you’ll hear eerie things, frightening things.”
Mr. Graff said he still vividly remembered the chilling series of transmissions he listened to in 2000, when the police were investigating the execution-style shootings of seven bound-and-gagged workers at a Wendy’s restaurant in Queens.
Though there is nothing illegal about listening to emergency scanners, Breaking News Network did end up in court in 1997, when the Gessmans and others were accused of unlawfully intercepting pager messages sent between New York City officials. The men said that the charges were baseless but that they eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanors to bring the case to an end.
The service monitors more than a dozen scanners tuned to channels used by police officers, firefighters and ambulance operators in New York and New Jersey. Descriptions of robberies and automobile accidents are common. So are reports of emotionally disturbed people barricaded behind doors and suspicious packages left in public places.
Only a small percentage of those transmissions yield something newsworthy. Workers for the service learn to listen for signals that something out of the ordinary is happening, then enter information into a computer that transmits it to thousands of pagers and computers.
The task of separating the significant from the prosaic is complicated by the fact that police and fire dispatchers often communicate using numerical codes that vary from town to town or county to county.
“You just start hearing different voice inflections,” Steven Gessman said. “All of a sudden they start sounding a little bit excited and you lock in on certain words.”
During a recent visit the scanner desk was helmed by Daniel Meyers, a 20-year-old from South Beach, Staten Island. He sat in front a computer facing square metal speakers connected to 14 scanners marked with labels including “FDNY,” “EMS” and “Alerts.”
There were reports of a possible heart attack victim near the Rockaways in Queens, a fire in a building in Jersey City and a bank robbery on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Mr. Meyers occasionally turned up the volume to listen more closely. He looked up locations on maps and spoke on the phone to people calling in tips.
Robert Gessman leaned against the desk, listening to the hum of the voices emanating from the scanners. “We joke about how little people actually know about what’s going on every day,” he said. “Then when you listen to the scanners you start to realize.”
Published: December 16, 2008
A giant crane topples on the East Side of Manhattan and seven people are killed. A steam pipe explodes near Grand Central Terminal, leaving one passer-by dead, injuring dozens of others and forcing a number of businesses to close. A fire rips through a home in the Bronx, killing 10 members of two immigrant families from West Africa.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Daniel Meyers monitoring scanners for the Breaking News Network, a subscription-based service used mainly by news outlets.
Most people got news of these major New York stories from television, radio, the newspaper or, more and more, the Web.
But some of the first hints that something big was happening came from a series of transmissions from outside the five boroughs. Those messages came from a strip mall in New Jersey and were sent to pagers and computers in newsrooms in New York City and beyond.
The mall is home to a company called the Breaking News Network, started in the early 1990s by twin brothers who were working as electronics salesmen and who believed that journalists eager for a scoop would pay for a pager service that transmitted fragments of conversation culled from radio frequencies used by emergency responders, including police officers and firefighters.
The pager messages are terse, typically containing little more than a street address and a two- or three-word description of what is thought to be happening there. One recent alert was about an apparent car crash in Brooklyn: “Car Vs Bldg | 225a Wyckoff St Brooklyn, NY | 12/3/2008 8:52 a.m.”
Scant as they may be, those bits of information allow reporters and photographers to quickly start heading to the scene, giving them perhaps an advantage over their rivals or maybe allowing them to arrive in time to witness events firsthand.
Inside a sparsely furnished third-floor suite in the strip mall, in Fort Lee, a handful of employees work 24 hours a day, tapping out pager messages surrounded by the raspy crackle and chatter of scanners.
“It’s never a boring job,” one of the company’s founders, Steven Gessman, 49, said in the office where he works with his brother, Robert. “Just sitting here you’ll hear about a bank robbery in Manhattan or a fire in Brooklyn.”
The company, which does not disclose its rates, has subscribers beyond journalists, including public safety officials, insurance adjusters, utility workers, tow truck operators. Many assignment editors at television stations and daily papers consider the pagers a necessity, if only because they know the competition subscribes.
“We don’t have the staff to dedicate one person to just listen to scanners,” said Shannon Troetel, the assignment manager at New York 1, a 24-hour cable news channel based in Manhattan. “We depend on them to be our ears.”
Though the pagers often provide useful clues, they have also been known to send reporters on a wild goose chase — a seemingly horrific traffic accident with many seriously injured turns out to be a fender-bender with no one hurt.
“We do raw news,” said Robert Gessman. “On occasion there’s a report that turns out to be inaccurate, in most cases because the person on the scene gives an inaccurate report on the radio.”
The service relies on hundreds of volunteers and news buffs who listen to scanners at home and call the Fort Lee headquarters when they hear something they think is noteworthy. Among them is Tom Graff, 55, a retired electrician in Gravesend, Brooklyn, who said he often listened to his scanners when he cannot sleep.
“It’s soothing in a way, therapeutic, and it keeps you in tune with what’s going on,” he said “But sometimes you’ll hear eerie things, frightening things.”
Mr. Graff said he still vividly remembered the chilling series of transmissions he listened to in 2000, when the police were investigating the execution-style shootings of seven bound-and-gagged workers at a Wendy’s restaurant in Queens.
Though there is nothing illegal about listening to emergency scanners, Breaking News Network did end up in court in 1997, when the Gessmans and others were accused of unlawfully intercepting pager messages sent between New York City officials. The men said that the charges were baseless but that they eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanors to bring the case to an end.
The service monitors more than a dozen scanners tuned to channels used by police officers, firefighters and ambulance operators in New York and New Jersey. Descriptions of robberies and automobile accidents are common. So are reports of emotionally disturbed people barricaded behind doors and suspicious packages left in public places.
Only a small percentage of those transmissions yield something newsworthy. Workers for the service learn to listen for signals that something out of the ordinary is happening, then enter information into a computer that transmits it to thousands of pagers and computers.
The task of separating the significant from the prosaic is complicated by the fact that police and fire dispatchers often communicate using numerical codes that vary from town to town or county to county.
“You just start hearing different voice inflections,” Steven Gessman said. “All of a sudden they start sounding a little bit excited and you lock in on certain words.”
During a recent visit the scanner desk was helmed by Daniel Meyers, a 20-year-old from South Beach, Staten Island. He sat in front a computer facing square metal speakers connected to 14 scanners marked with labels including “FDNY,” “EMS” and “Alerts.”
There were reports of a possible heart attack victim near the Rockaways in Queens, a fire in a building in Jersey City and a bank robbery on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Mr. Meyers occasionally turned up the volume to listen more closely. He looked up locations on maps and spoke on the phone to people calling in tips.
Robert Gessman leaned against the desk, listening to the hum of the voices emanating from the scanners. “We joke about how little people actually know about what’s going on every day,” he said. “Then when you listen to the scanners you start to realize.”
