in 1987, he was active until the news service was overtaken by a larger corporation. In 1968, the NEA was offering about 75 features to more than 750 client newspapers. In the 1970s, Ira Berkow was sports editor for the NEA. In May 1978 the Scripps Company merged its two syndication arms, NEA and United Feature Syndicate (established by Scripps in 1919), to form United Media Enterprises. On February 24, 2011, the Scripps Company struck a distribution deal with Universal Uclick (now known as Andrews McMeel Syndication) for syndication of United Media's 150 comic strip and news features, which became effective on June 1 of that year. While United Media effectively ceased to exist, Scripps still maintains copyrights and intellectual property rights. Comic strips The NEA's earliest successful comic strip was A.D. Condo & J. W. Raper's The Outbursts of Everett True (launched in 1905). Early on, Charles N. Landon (1878–1937) joined NEA as art director. Founder of the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning, a mail-order correspondence course that trained a generation of cartoonists, Landon personally hired some graduates to draw features at the syndicate. Counted among these successful students were Roy Crane, Merrill Blosser, V. T. Hamlin, Bill Holman, Chic Young, and Ethel Hays. (In the case of Hays, Landon taught her by mail and then brought her to NEA to draw syndicated features.) Cartoonist Gene Ahern moved to Cleveland in 1914 to work on staff for the NEA as a sportswriter and artist, initially inking comic drawings for $18 a week. He worked on such strips as Dream Dope, Fathead Fritz, Sporty Sid and his Pals, Taking Her to the Ball Game, and Ain't Nature Wonderful. In 1915, he introduced Squirrel Food, later known as Otto Auto and then Balmy Benny before returning to its original title. In May 1915, Landon hired Merrill Blosser to work at NEA. Blosser was 23 when he began in the NEA art department, initially doing cartoons based on news events and then drawing five daily panels. One of these, titled Freckles, began as a one-column daily gag panel on August 16, expanding into a full comic strip on September 20 when it was retitled Freckles and His Friends. One by one, each of the other panels were dropped. In July 1916, Blosser started another strip, Miniature Movies, which evolved into Chestnut Charlie, continuing until early in 1918 when Blosser concentrated exclusively