Feature Syndicates

Origins

The first informally syndicated feature in American journalism appears to have been “Journal of Occurrences,” a propaganda column written in Boston in 1768. It appeared weekly in three papers for just under a year, letting readers in other colonies know what was happening under British military occupation of Boston. But the column was “informally” carried by many other papers as well.

Ansel Kellogg founded a ready-print service in Chicago during the Civil War (1861–65). It provided such features as columns, poems, sometimes serialized fiction, and other entertainment-based material and display advertising for inside pages of newspapers, leaving the front and back page open for the local paper to fill with stories and advertisements. This process became known as “patented insides,” for the patent medicine advertising they carried. Until the 1890s, lack of effective copyright protection made metropolitan newspapers widespread users of British literary and dramatic works as filler, often published in serial form.

Development of the stereotyping process provided a technology boost to syndication. Light stereotype molds (dubbed “boiler plate”) could be readily shipped or mailed to subscribing papers. Soon the business of providing these got organized with formation of the Western Newspaper Union in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1872. Other firms developed as syndication took hold, but Western grew to dominate the field by 1917, serving some 7,000 papers (many of them weeklies serving small communities) at its peak. This approach gave way in turn (it ended entirely in 1952) to yet another syndication idea.

The rise and expansion of both daily and Sunday newspapers (the latter's longer formats called for more content, and thus demand for syndicated graphic and text material increased) helped create a new form of syndication late in the nineteenth century. C. A. Dana's New York Sun syndicated use of stories by Bret Harte and Henry James to a limited number of other papers. Using stereotype and elec-trotyping technology, the American Press Association began to serve daily papers in 1882. Irving Bacheller (1859–1950), a journalist and writer who created the first newspaper feature syndicate, focused on syndicating material to daily papers beginning a year later and was within a few years serving more than 150 of them in cities across the nation. Publisher S. S. McClure joined the growing number of syndicators in 1884, often using content from his magazine McClure's by such authors as Jack London, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and William Dean Howells. He was soon providing up to 30,000 words a week to subscribers.

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