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.

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.