Moses Koenigsberg was, in his own words, "educated in public schools and in newspaper offices." He reported for, edited, or owned approximately twenty newspapers, and demonstrated talent and integrity as a journalist and as a businessman; but he is little remembered today. He spent the most productive part of his career as an employee of William Randolph Hearst, and his accomplishments have often been attributed to the Hearst organization rather than to him personally. Koenigsberg conceived of, established, and ran the first modern newspaper features and comics syndicates; the features and news dispatches distributed by organizations under his control appeared regularly in newspapers having a mass circulation of 16,000,000 readers on weekdays and 25,000,000 on Sundays.

Koenigsberg says in his autobiography, King News (1941), that his father, Harris Wolf Koenigsberg, a Russian Jew, was permitted to marry Julia Foreman, the daughter of a Polish Jewish patriot, only after he promised her...