"Shots fired! Shots fired!" the police scanner screeched to life late one night while news photographer Mike Albans was working the overnight for the New York Daily News.

It was near 2 a.m. and Albans was sitting in his car under the FDR near the Manhattan Bridge. Until that moment, it had been quiet, and Albans was nodding off to the hypnotic pulse of traffic on the highway above. Suddenly, an NYPD officer was in a gunfight for his life, one block away. Albans was so near sleep he thought it was all in his head—until he realized he was hearing gunshots in real life.

"I thought I was dreaming. But as I'm listening to it, I'm hearing POP, POP, POP, POP, POP. And I'm actually hearing it," Albans told Gothamist. Seconds later he was at the scene of the shootout—feet from a wounded NYPD officer.

"I'm there before the cops. They were just getting there," Albans said. "I'm literally three feet away. I got a picture of the cop being carried away by two cops. They didn't even get to the ambulance; they threw him in a squad car."

After that, Albans saw there was another photograph to take: other NYPD officers had collared the shooter. They had him pinned to the ground nearby, "with the guns pointed down to his head."

That was 1985 or so, Albans recalled. Now 57 and retired from the Daily News since 2008, Albans said what happened that night is just "one of the thousand crazy stories that Manhattan was at night. People didn't really see that. All those that came into the city to go to work, they never really saw what the underbelly was of this place."

arrow August 7, 2007, 5 alarm fire at 37-28 Junction Boulevard, Queens, captured during the overnight shift. JB Nicholas

But today New York City's tabloid tradition of 24/7 local news coverage is one breath from death. Two weeks ago, the Daily News eliminated its overnight shift for news photographers, known as the "lobster trick."

"There's always been an overnight shift. Before last week, the Daily News had someone doing that continuously, every single night since at least the 1920s," said Marc A. Hermann, historian for the New York Press Photographers Association.

Hermann turned the last lobster trick for the Daily News on September 28, covering the fatal shooting of NYPD officer Brian Mulkeen and alleged armed suspect Antonio Williams in the Bronx.

"A photographer listening to a police scanner racing to the scenes of shootings, fires and other catastrophes is the essence of news coverage in New York City," Hermann explained.

The Daily News also eliminated its overnight shift for reporters earlier in 2019, according to one long-time reporter. The reporter spoke on condition of anonymity, because they are not authorized to speak about internal operations.

That leaves the New York Post as the last truly 24/7 news-gathering operation in New York City. The Post’s PR shop, Rubenstein Public Relations, did not respond to a request for comment.

Tilden Katz, spokesperson for the Daily News’s owner, Tribune Publishing, also did not respond.

arrow Photographer Seth Gottfried captured an asbestos plume in Flatiron caused by a steam pipe explosion. He was working the overnight shift when he took the picture. courtesy Seth Gottfried

Before the founding of the New York Daily News in 1919, most newspapers were stodgy broadsheets that rarely printed images. The Daily News called itself New York City's "picture newspaper." Its familiar icon—a small circle inside squares—depicts a camera from its early era.

The News delivered a picture-laden populist product that peeled back the curtains of power and privilege, while paying obsessive attention to neighborhood news and crime—like capturing and publishing the first photograph of an execution by electric chair.

"The Daily News outsold every paper in the country. There were 2 million daily, 4 million on Sunday. We lost more papers that fell off the truck than other publications' circulation," said John Roca, who worked full-time for the Daily News as a photographer for 41 years, from 1970 to 2011.

The Daily News' success spawned scores of imitators, and news photographers were the workhorses that powered tabloid ascendancy.

Among the photographers who covered New York City at night for the Daily News in its heyday was Weegee the Famous. Weegee started in 1935 and made a career out of photographing killings, crimes, street life, fires and funerals.

arrow The body of Dominick Didato on Elizabeth Street, in 1936. Weegee / The International Center of Photography

Charles Ruppmann was another. He worked full-time at the Daily News for 50 years, from July 1960 to 2010. After working his way up through the ranks as a copy boy, head copy boy and apprentice in the studio where Daily News film was developed, Ruppmann's first assigned shift as a photographer was the overnight.

"They called it the lobster trick," Ruppmann said. "They called it that because that's when the lobster came in, when they brought it into the Fulton Fish Market.”

Ruppmann explained, "In the lobster trick there were two shifts. You could be assigned from 12 to 8 a.m., or you could be assigned from 1 to 9 a.m."

Now 76, Ruppmann has his own special lobster trick story: he spent Christmas Eve and morning 1969 with notorious bank robber WIllie Sutton.

Sutton had woken up that morning in Attica with more than 100 years and two life sentences to serve. Then Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller freed him because "he had emphysema and was preparing for a major operation on arteries in his legs," according to the FBI. A Daily News airplane flew upstate, scooped up Sutton, and flew him back to LaGuardia. That's where Ruppmann met him.

"I took him around the city. I showed him the Christmas exhibits," Ruppmann said. Then Ruppmann's boss "said, 'Stay with him. Stay with him all night.' I spent the night with Willie Sutton."

"I got triple time because it was Christmas," Ruppmann recalled. "That's the only time I remember anybody getting triple time."

Ruppmann called it "the golden age of press photographers.”

"We had motorcycle couriers and we had drivers. We had two planes. One of them was a Mallard. It could land in the water,” Ruppmann said.

Roca, who started working right out of high school in 1970, remembers the last of the Golden Age: "When I started at the Daily News I remember photographers all dressed up. They all looked like airline pilots sitting in the ready room."

The Daily News sold both of its airplanes by the mid-1970s.

Today, Roca said, social media is undermining professional photojournalism.

"It's the end of the business because everyone has a camera. Everyone's on the spot, so to speak," Roca said. "Its degrading the value of news photographs. It's killing my ability to make a living as a professional photojournalist.”

Roca said he took an exclusive photograph of the terrorist behind the 2017 New York City truck attack, Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov. Normally, a photograph like that would be worth at least several thousand dollars. But someone tweeted a picture of Saipov. Instead of purchasing his journalism, publications used the free Twitter photograph.

"Its descending rapidly," Roca concluded.

Journalist Oliya Fedun started a service called Scootercaster in 2018 to cover breaking news and pick up some of the stories that the tabloids can't cover. Scootercaster sells photos and videos taken by its reporters to commercial news outlets across the city.

"We do night time, but not the full night," Fedun said. "We would [work] until 2 a.m. sometimes, and maybe sometimes as early as 5 a.m. I don't do full overnights."

arrow A Daily News cover shot by Marc A. Hermann during the lobster shift. courtesy Marc A. Hermann

The Daily News was sold, for $1 and pension liabilities, to Tribune in September 2017. After buying the Daily News, Tribune laid off all of the Daily News’ remaining staff photographers and a large portion of the photo desk, along with roughly half the staff in July 2018.

"We're failing the city," the long-time Daily News reporter said, lamenting the loss of the lobster trick and, with it, the near century-long Daily News' history of 24/7 news coverage.

"If there's no photographer or reporter there, what ends up reported is the authorities' version, as opposed to the city's actual events," the reporter explained. "The lobster trick was an institution."

Back in 1985, the photographs Albans took that night of the shootout's immediate aftermath helped the Brooklyn native get hired as a Daily News staff photographer. He moved to Montana in 2008 to try his hand at ranching. Today, he lives in Vermont and does corporate work.

"Being that close and seeing life and death, then the next day waking up late and seeing your pictures in the paper. It was one of those days that you fall in love with what you do,” Albans said.

After a moment of reflection, the veteran photojournalist added it had been a privilege to document the "real history of that city, that's probably never going to happen again."

Shortly after midnight Saturday October 5, four homeless men were murdered in downtown Manhattan. No Daily News photographer got to the murder scenes until after sunrise.