The changes at United Media which we discussed Monday literally will be the end of an era. United Media is the last newspaper syndicate operating in New York City, once the epicenter of the syndication industry, of the newspaper industry itself. King Features Syndicate does maintain an address on 57th Street, but I’m not sure what they do there. King shopped out its editing and production to a company in Orlando more than a decade ago, as United Media will be shopping out its daily operation to Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City. Only at United Media can one still walk into a syndicate office in New York City and see dozens of workers performing jobs that were vital within a unique and prestigious trade that once fluorished at the foot of an Olympus inhabited by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. With the closing of United Media’s Madison Avenue office over the next three months, what remains of that era ends entirely. I’m not saying it comes as a surprise or even that it wasn’t inevitable, but it is sad.