King Features Syndicate
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Print syndication |
| Founded | 1914 |
| Founder | William Randolph Hearst |
| Headquarters | New York City, United States |
| Products | Comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons |
| Owner | Hearst |
| Website | kingfeatures |
King Features Syndicate, Inc. is a print syndication company owned by The Hearst Corporation that distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles and games to nearly 5,000 newspapers worldwide. King Features Syndicate is a unit of Hearst Holdings, Inc., which combines the Hearst Corporation's cable network partnerships, television programming and distribution activities and syndication companies. King Features' affiliate syndicates are North America Syndicate and Cowles Syndicate. Each week, Reed Brennan Media Associates, a unit of Hearst, edits and distributes more than 200 features for King Features.
William Randolph Hearst's newspapers began syndicating material in 1895 after receiving requests from other newspapers. In 1914, Hearst and his manager Moses Koenigsberg consolidated all of Hearst's syndication enterprises under one banner. Koenigsberg gave it his own name (the German word König means king) when he launched King Features Syndicate. Production escalated in 1916 with King Features buying and selling its own staff-created feature material. A trade publication — Circulation — was published by King Features between 1916 and 1933. Syndication peaked in the mid-1930s with 130 syndicates offering 1,600 features to more than 13,700 newspapers.
In 1941, Koenigsberg wrote an autobiographical history of the company entitled King News. Hearst paid close attention to the comic strips, even in the last years of his life, as is evident in these 1945–46 correspondence excerpts, originally in Editor & Publisher (December 1946), about the creation of "Dick's Adventures in Dreamland" — a strip that made its debut on Sunday, January 12, 1947; written by former Daily News reporter Max Trell and illustrated by Neil O'Keefe (who also drew for King Features a strip based on Edgar Wallace's Inspector Wade of Scotland Yard):
In the 1940s, Ward Greene (1893–1956) was King Features' editor, having worked his way up through the ranks. He was a reporter and war correspondent for the Atlanta Journal for 4 years (1913-17), moving to the New York Tribune in 1917 and then the New York Journal as correspondent in France and Germany (1918–19). He joined King Features in 1921, became a writer and editor of the magazine section in 1925, advancing to executive editor and general manager. Vice president Bradley Kelly (1894-1969) was a comics editor during the 1940s.
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