This is pretty standard for newspapers of the period, which generally printed notices like this as a matter of course. This still survives in some places, vestigially, as the "police blotter," a list of arrests, lost-and-found items, crimes, etc. This is more likely to be a feature of smaller newspapers today, as bigger papers keep slashing print offerings to try to defray costs, but the tradition of reporting on mundane news like this goes back to early colonial newspapers, which would include things like ship arrivals, public auctions, sales of enslaved people, and a lot of other minutia like that.

As for how the information was gathered, the time-honored tradition was to go to the police station or sheriff's department and look at their overnight book, copy it down into a notebook, and type it up back at the office. In a previous job, I worked on a project on automating that data from our county joint communications office to publish their crimes data in a map format, which worked well until they started changing the .csv format every couple days weeks. But for a paper like the Times in 1914, it would have been a reporter with a notebook aggregating it from the city fire department/fire records.