City News, a just-the-facts wire service that covered Chicago’s cops and courts 24 hours a day, seven days a week for more than 100 years, was about to file its last story on Saturday night. As they waited for the bulletin to appear, more than 100 current and former City News staffers crowded into the Billy Goat Tavern, a nearby bar popular with journalists ever since it opened in 1934, one year after Prohibition ended. Yellow crime-scene tape hung from the Billy Goat’s ceiling, substituting for black crepe. Against the wall, the mourners draped a banner bearing the wire’s hard-bitten motto: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The shuttering of City News comes as the newspaper industry grapples with the challenges posed by the Internet, which has transformed the way consumers get information and turned upstarts like Google Inc. into feared rivals. Indeed, the Tribune Co., the wire’s owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, said it was closing the wire and laying off its 19 employees, in part because competitors were using it to get news to readers hours before the Tribune published its paper editions.