CALLING ALL CARS.

Winter is the season for fires. Night watchman in a warehouse plugs in a space heater and goes on his rounds, the wiring overloads, the area's desolate, so the fire grows until you get the kind of conflagration that Robert and Steven Gessmann watched with their mother thirty years ago, in New Jersey. Their parents had been fans of big, gaudy fires since the bowling alley next door to their apartment, in Union City, went up in flames. They watched raptly from their living room until they realized the windows were getting hot. Robert and Steven listened to a two-way radio for reports of fires. If they heard of one, or if they happened to see a plume of smoke on the horizon, they'd get in the car with their mother. "We'd shut the door and off we'd go," Mrs. Gessmann says. "Plenty of times we rode around and around, circling the fire to see how close we could get before they stopped us."

The Gessmann brothers--tall, thin, cropped hair and beards, wire glasses (they're identical twins)--are forty-three. They now have a business called Breaking News Network, which supplies CNN, several New York City television stations, and the major New York City dailies with bulletins about possible stories--a fire, a flipped car, a perp search, a stabbing or a shooting, a jumper, or a floater in the harbor. Each client receives a pager. The Gessmanns and one or two employees sit in an office on the third floor of a small office building in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a few hundred yards from the George Washington Bridge. They listen to scanners. The Gessmanns recognize that when a voice rises in tone it is likely that a noteworthy event is occurring. Such discernment Steven describes as "an original skill."

Breaking News Network covers a territory extending from Virginia to northeastern Connecticut. The Gessmanns have cultivated a network of sources who send them e-mails and call the office. They divide their approximately four hundred sources into two categories: tippers and reporters. Tippers provide information that the Gessmanns like to hear from more than one source. Reporters have proved sufficiently reliable that their ...