an office in San Francisco. NEA rapidly grew and delivered content to 400 newspapers in 1920 and about 700 in 1930. Today, it is the oldest syndicate still in operation. Scripps created the United Press news agency in 1907 by uniting three smaller syndicates and controlled it until a 1958 merger with William Randolph Hearst's smaller competing agency, INS, to form United Press International. With the Hearst Corporation as a minority partner, UPI continued under Scripps management until it was sold off in 1982. A separate wire service, the Scripps Howard News Service, operated for 96 years from 1917 to 2013. United Feature Syndicate was formed in 1919 as a division of UP to distribute editorial columns, features and comic strips, and became a dominant player in the syndication market in the fall of 1931 thanks to Scripps' acquisition of the New York World, which controlled the Pulitzer company's syndication arms, Press Publishing Co. and World Feature Service. In May 1978, Scripps merged United Feature Syndicate and Newspaper Enterprise Association to form United Media Enterprises. The company expanded its newspaper holdings throughout the pre-World War II period, acquiring many titles and merging them, including the Rocky Mountain News and Knoxville News-Sentinel. A trickle of closures and sales occurred over the next few decades. In 1966, Scripps' New York World-Telegram was merged into the New York World Journal Tribune, which closed in 1967. Papers in Indianapolis, Washington, Houston and Fort Worth were closed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the former flagship Cleveland Press was sold in 1980. Scripps also closed properties in Memphis, Columbus, Thousand Oaks and El Paso throughout the 1980s and 1990s, while selling the Pittsburgh Press in 1992. In 1985, the company went into home video foray with its acquisition of Kartes Video Communications in an effort to expand the marketplace. Two years later, Scripps Howard sold off Kartes Video Communications back to its founders, after an aborted deal where Scripps-Howard's acquisition of Hanes failed. In 1997, Scripps bought daily newspapers in the Texas cities of Abilene, Wichita Falls, San Angelo and Plano, plus the paper in Anderson, South Carolina, from Harte-Hanks Communications, along with 25 non-daily newspapers and San Antonio-based KENS-TV and KENS-AM. The purchase price was to be between $605 and $775 million, depending on a federal ruling. (Scripps eventually spun off all of its newspapers into Journal Media Group in 2015.) Scripps made its