Moses Koenigsberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Moses Koenigsberg (April 16, 1879-September 21, 1945), as an executive for William Randolph Hearst, ran King Features Syndicate. Comic strips, features and news supervised by Koenigsberg appeared in newspapers having a mass circulation of 16,000,000 readers on weekdays and 25,000,000 on Sundays.
He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and his career began at the age of nine when he published a monthly newspaper, The Amateur. When he was 13, he won $100 in a Chamber of Commerce essay competition and began reporting for the San Antonio Times. He lost that job when he was sued for exposing corruption among prosecuting attorneys, who were taking fines from prostitutes. The suit was dropped, and he moved to Houston to continue his newspaper career as a reporter with the Houston Age and as an editor of Texas World. Relocating in New Orleans, he signed on as a reporter for the New Orleans Item. Back in San Antonio, he launched the Evening Star in 1892. He continued on with newspapers in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York. [1]
During the Spanish-American War, he served with an Alabama volunteer unit and with the First Division of the Seventh Army Corps in Miami. His book, Southern Martyrs (1898), is about military censorship during that war.
In 1903, he became city editor of Hearst's Chicago American. In 1913, Koenigsberg headed a Hearst subsidiary, Newspaper Feature Service, Inc., to sell Hearst's features and comics to non-Hearst papers. The syndicate later took on a shortened form of his own name, Koenig, and in 1915, it was shortened to "King", and the name became the King Features Service. [2]
In 1941, Frederick A. Stokes Co. published his memoirs, King News:An Autobiography.
