Feature Syndicates

A feature syndicate is a supplier offering an often quite considerable menu of comics, editorial cartoons, columns, and other features for newspapers across the country. Papers pay a subscription fee for what they select to use, the fee varying by the size of the market and circulation of the subscribing paper. Feature syndicates help broaden the non-news content offerings of newspapers, especially those in smaller communities, by providing national markets for print and graphic material.

Feature syndication in the American press has a long history—back to before the Revolution in one case, though really starting a century later with preprinted features distributed to rural 19th-century weekly newspapers. Modern syndicates serving the daily press developed early in the 20th century around popular comic strips, political columnists, and ...