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Syndicated Sunday comics and magazine supplements, filled with national brand advertising, reached a truly national, nearly simultaneous readership. Through syndication, small regional papers could provide the same features as big city Sunday papers. To maintain their edge, metropolitan Sunday papers began rotogravure sections of high-quality half-toned photography. Hollywood studios embraced syndicated newspaper features to explain to a mass public how everybody was going to the movies, despite watching different films in thousands of theatres. This syndicated logic of corporate cooperation established a foundation for the synchronous broadcasts of network radio in the 1920s, which allowed national-brand products to extend their syndicated print advertising as sponsors of popular shows. The most successful radio program of its day, Amos ‘n’ Andy, began as a “radio comic strip” and extended the link between syndication and broadcasting. The systemic racism of syndicated humor opened an ambiguous form of inclusion, even as some Black newspapers launched their own weekly color comic strips and tabloid magazine supplements. For the rest of the twentieth century, the Sunday paper—as an object, as a habit, as a business—continued to mediate consumer and commercial culture.

Sunday papers regularly illustrated features about their own printing and circulation. Presented as a modern spectacle, the story of delivering the paper was supported by a complex system of circulation. The high-speed cylinder printing press was an assembly line for mass reproduction. Pulitzer's New York World pressroom had a viewing gallery for all to see the paper in production, an important parallel to its slogan, “circulation books open to all.” Other papers followed suit. Mass delivery was likewise profiled with sensational self-promotion, although the semblance of local competition over circulation masked tight monopoly control in distribution. The American News Company had a throttle on national newspaper circulation, controlling many urban carrier routes, sales aboard trains, and wholesale distribution of out-of-town papers, books and magazines. City delivery relied on fleets of wagons and trucks; the regional fast train delivered Sunday papers beyond city limits. But newsboys were the public face of these continental networks of circulation. Despite newsboys' sentimental favor, the push for technologies led to coin-operated news boxes, at first called “automatic newsboys.” The fascination with newspaper delivery reminded readers that getting physical copies of the paper into their homes required conquering the limits of time and space.

Sunday papers regularly illustrated features about their own printing and circulation. Presented as a modern spectacle, the story of delivering the paper was supported by a complex system of circulation. The high-speed cylinder printing press was an assembly line for mass reproduction. Pulitzer's New York World pressroom had a viewing gallery for all to see the paper in production, an important parallel to its slogan, “circulation books open to all.” Other papers followed suit. Mass delivery was likewise profiled with sensational self-promotion, although the semblance of local competition over circulation masked tight monopoly control in distribution. The American News Company had a throttle on national newspaper circulation, controlling many urban carrier routes, sales aboard trains, and wholesale distribution of out-of-town papers, books and magazines. City delivery relied on fleets of wagons and trucks; the regional fast train delivered Sunday papers beyond city limits. But newsboys were the public face of these continental networks of circulation. Despite newsboys' sentimental favor, the push for technologies led to coin-operated news boxes, at first called “automatic newsboys.” The fascination with newspaper delivery reminded readers that getting physical copies of the paper into their homes required conquering the limits of time and space.

There was no singular type of Sunday paper. A multiplicity of Sunday supplements produced new kinds of readers through their very form and design. Each asked readers to do more than read, but to interact with the materiality of the paper as a form of leisure. Sunday supplements established a different temporality from the weekday newspaper and the bustle of the workweek. They entreated readers to spend time with the paper, tying them to the rhythms of the weekend and the home. This temporality linked one Sunday to another, making a subscription all the more logical by providing a cultural aesthetic for the home. Most varieties of supplements appealed to women readers, who were considered especially important for securing home delivery. Lithographed art and photographic supplements, sheet music, novels and fiction magazines, fashion plates, and sewing patterns: all offered a distinctly feminine appeal. Games, puzzles, coloring books and all variety of paper toys appealed to children. Women readers found aesthetic appreciation; juvenile readers delighted in aesthetic play. Even in later days of early radio, Sunday papers were conduits of popular education explicitly including all members of the family as reading subjects, each invested in subscribing to the paper.

Expanding Sunday newspaper circulation and mass readership meant establishing or altering networks of technologies and systems of transportation. In the 1890s, great advances in audio-visual reproduction introduced new technologies of recorded and telephonic sound, and of moving and print images. All became supplements to newsprint. Illustrated Sunday features often extolled technological advancements to heighten and extend the sensory experiences of newspaper reading. Particularly descriptive journalism was routinely labeled “pen pictures,” but new technologies were used symbolically to enhance eyewitness reporting. Hot-air ballooning let reporters write from beyond a human perspective. Columns were written as talk from telephones, described as if projected by vitascopes and instantaneous photographs. Interviews were illustrated by photographs and frames from moving pictures. Experiments combining news reporting with cinema and wireless. Many early newsreels were produced and promoted as newspaper supplements named Herald Movies and Motion Picture Magazines. Feature stories depicted future uses of visual telegraphy and wireless printing. Discourses of marvel and wonder posited the Sunday paper itself as a marvel of modern society, connected to all the important advances of the day. In all these cases, precision, sound, and movement added to newspapers' foundational strength in mass address, in the ability to circulate.

Syndication provided currency and connectivity on a mass scale, overcoming the limitations of print circulation. In the 1880s, newspaper syndicates began to offer an affordable means for smaller newspapers to include new stories by popular writers in their Sunday editions. Syndicated humorists, Bill Nye and M. Quad, were among the most popular features, later joined by syndicated cartoons from The Comic Sketch Club. Many Sunday papers in cities across the country began printing entire pages of humor and comics, then entire comic supplements. To compete, metropolitan Sunday papers introduced color and illustrated supplements, at first serving multiple purposes—decorative, humorous, and satirical at once. Color sections opened a special opportunity for cartoonists. Newspapers had often used recurring comic characters as mascots to personify the popularity of the paper. But the incredible popularity of The Yellow Kid, so central to the rivalry of “yellow journalism” between Hearst and Pulitzer, led other cartoonists to create recurring children's characters, giving rise to the serial comic strip. Color comic syndication began late in 1900, first with Hearst's famous cartoon characters. With syndication, even small–city papers without their own color press could include the new century's newest popular media sensation: the funny pages.

The Sunday paper transformed the weekday edition with inserts and supplements of all shapes and sizes, extended beyond print into newsreels and radio broadcasts. The Sunday paper became so large and voluminous it needed to be organized: managed and collected over time, shared across an entire family. It transformed metropolitan, commercial culture into national popular culture. Everyone was invited to enjoy it, despite ever-present racist stereotypes and sexist caricatures in comic strips and advertising. The most popular Sunday features were nationally known, even before widespread syndication. Part One of The Sunday Paper explores subscription as media relationships between the paper and its readers. Part Two investigates circulation as an extension of the paper into audio-visual media. Part Three proposes syndication laid a foundation for network broadcasting by making the Sunday paper central to the American mass market and popular culture. A brief conclusion considers digital engagement with newspapers today, with the Sunday paper all but dead. Historically, the Sunday edition aimed to overcome the constraints of newsprint entirely. Now accompanied by streams of podcasts, video and commentary, news still contains the crafty combination of information, entertainment, and promotion that animated the Sunday paper in the past.

Subscriptions enhanced the economic success of the Sunday paper by helping to produce expert reading subjects. In the 1880s, new forms of journalism organized readers' mass engagement through fundraising for charitable and civic causes. The reformist impulse spawned undercover reports by women journalists, while techniques for engagement became popularity contests and guessing games. Both were key features of Sunday papers. New forms of newspaper reading such as these contests and games, complete with prizes and giveaways, which were instrumental in coordinating readers' sense of connection to wider cultural events. In New York, The Morning Journal and The Recorder launched novel forms of Sunday art supplements. The promotional tactic was borrowed from trade-card advertising to facilitate brand loyalty, a simple technology shaping readers into consumers. Collecting series of supplements and clipping coupons encouraged readers not to treat Sunday papers as disposable, but instead parts of cultural and consumer life that could gain value if saved. Clipping, amassing and mailing in coupons for art supplements transformed newspaper subscriptions into social relations with all variety of mass leisure and consumption. Sunday supplements demonstrated how daily newspapers were incomplete. Sunday papers extended the work of daily newspapers into new domains of modern life.

A century ago, newspapers continually reimagined reader engagement, with the Sunday supplement taking a lead role. The digital newspaper is still using many of the same tactics to stake out new cultural importance for news reading, at a moment when its form and format are being transfigured into new platforms. Digital forms like podcasts, video, and social media may at first seem desperate attempts to sustain an industry with a broken business model. And yet, many of these digital news supplements show remarkable consistency with the history told in The Sunday Paper. Many efforts to introduce new forms of online engagement still originate in the remnants of the Sunday magazine, despite its features appearing online, days in advance, no longer accompanied by advertising flyers. Like the giveaways and contests before them, podcasts also routinely reference listeners back to subscriptions to the newspaper. Historically, new media technologies allowed newspapers to position themselves as all-encompassing conduits for story-telling, building relationships with readers through a variety of audio-visual as well as print supplements. This process continues in the digital age, outlasting the Sunday paper as a distinct form and habit.