Excellent account here by Howard Wolinsky of 27 years at the Sun-Times:

It was around 11:30am March 30, 1981. I was having an early lunch at Ricardo’s, a Chicago press corps hangout, with my new boss, Alan Mutter, the city editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. I was the new medical writer at the “the Bright One.”

As we were getting acquainted, we caught a news bulletin on the radio: President Reagan had been shot.

Lunch was over. We ran back to the Sun-Times. Alan and the other editors began sending out reporters around the country to cover the story. I started working on my first story for the paper I grew up reading.

. . . .

And there’s more more more . . .