Featurewell

Overview

Featurewell is a New York-based online syndication service that markets articles and columns by professional journalists to newspapers, magazines and websites worldwide. Founded by journalist David Wallis around 2000, as Featurewell.com, it applied an internet marketplace model to an old trade: the resale of feature articles. Writers and publications placed already-published stories — and occasionally unpublished ones — in a searchable online archive; editors browsed abstracts, licensed a story with a few clicks and republished it in a new market, with the fee shared between the writer and Featurewell. At its mid-2000s height, the service syndicated work from more than a thousand individual journalists and from magazines and newspapers whose content it represented internationally.

The service's premise was that a good feature does not exhaust its value in its first publication. A profile, an investigation or a travel piece published in New York might be exactly what an editor in Dublin, Sydney or Johannesburg needs, yet before online syndication the writer had no practical way to find that editor. Featurewell built the meeting place, set the rates, handled the transaction and collected the money.

David Wallis and the Founding

David Wallis founded Featurewell as a working journalist who knew the freelance economy from inside. Trade profiles from its early years describe him as a contributing writer at Wired and a columnist for The Washington Post's travel section, and as a fierce defender of freelancers' rights. The trademark record for FEATUREWELL.COM in Wallis's name was filed in April 2000, marking the service's formal start at the moment the web was first reshaping freelance markets.

Wallis was selective about what the service sold. Early accounts put the roster at about 230 to 270 journalists within its first months and years, including prominent names such as Jimmy Breslin, David Margolick and later Christopher Hitchens, Eric Alterman and Andrei Codrescu. Within four months of selling, one conference report recorded, the service had sold about thirty thousand dollars' worth of stories in twenty countries. The numbers grew: a 2002 account counted some 800 writers using Featurewell and about 900 editors signed up to buy.

The Business Model: Second Rights and the 60–40 Split

Featurewell specialised in second rights — permission to republish a story that had already appeared once — while discouraging unpublished material. That focus shaped its economics. The writer typically had to own the rights being sold, which is why Wallis warned freelancers that they could not resell rights they had signed away to a first publisher under an all-rights contract; the service thus became part of the period's wider argument about writers retaining their copyright in the digital age.

The split most often reported was sixty percent to the writer and forty percent to Featurewell, a division contemporary accounts described as more generous than most syndicates, with Featurewell holding out for higher fees than many competitors. On a five-hundred-dollar sale, the writer received three hundred dollars, payable within thirty days of collection. Payment followed collection — if the publisher did not pay, the writer was not paid — and Wallis was candid that some good publications paid slowly. The model aligned the service with the writer: Featurewell earned only when it sold and collected.

How Editors Used the Service

For editors, Featurewell was an archive with a cash register. Abstracts of available stories could be browsed openly, while registered editors could read full articles and license them online. A features editor with a hole to fill, a special section to complete or a sudden need for authority on a topic could search by subject, buy a vetted story by a known writer and have publishable copy the same day. Contemporary comparisons likened it to an eBay for writers, though unlike an open auction, Featurewell curated its contributors, set its rates and stood behind the material.

The categories reflected magazine journalism at its broadest: politics, culture, travel, science, health and the environment among them, with conference reporting from 2001 noting a sprinkling of health and science stories rather than depth in medicine. The service's strength was the general-interest feature — the kind of well-reported, well-written piece that travels across borders because its subject, from a public figure to a social trend, is not tied to one city's news.

Publication Partners

Alongside individual journalists, Featurewell signed syndication deals with publications, marketing their archives through its online store. A 2005 announcement added In These Times, the Chicago-based magazine of social, environmental and economic justice reporting founded in 1976, and E/The Environmental Magazine, whose editor Jim Motavalli also contributed a weekly column on the politics of driving. Association of Alternative Newsweeklies coverage from the same period recorded alliances with The New York Observer and New Internationalist, the British magazine of world poverty and development reporting founded in 1973, for which Featurewell broadened access to readers and republication markets outside their home bases.

The largest such deal reported by Editor and Publisher gave Featurewell international distribution of TV Guide content: staff-written stories from the television and entertainment magazine were made available through Featurewell's searchable archive for republication in countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, Germany, Italy, Canada, Singapore, Chile, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. The same report, describing the service as six years old, noted that it already syndicated articles from The New York Observer, Mother Jones, Reason and The Hill, together with its thousand-plus individual journalists.

Place Among the Online Syndicates

Featurewell appeared in trade press as an exemplar of a new class of online syndicates that emerged around 2000 to serve downsized newsrooms. As publishers cut staff, the argument ran, pre-produced and already vetted material became a low-risk way to fill pages, while freelancers gained a route to resell evergreen work. Editor and Publisher's survey of these ventures contrasted models — some competitors charged sellers a small commission and let them set prices — with Featurewell's curated approach, in which Wallis chose the writers, set the rates and kept forty percent. Of the experiments of that moment, Featurewell's longevity and its roster of name writers and partner magazines made it one of the most credible.

The service also benefited from the alternative-press network: it was an associate member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, whose member papers were natural buyers of inexpensive, high-quality features and natural sellers of their own distinctive journalism into wider markets.

Geographic Scope

From its New York base, Featurewell sold internationally from the start — twenty countries within its first months, by the founder's early account — and its publication deals were explicitly structured around foreign republication rights. The TV Guide arrangement alone named thirteen territories across Europe, Asia, the Pacific, Africa, North America and the Middle East. That geography was the point of second-rights syndication: a story's first market is usually its home country, so the resale market is disproportionately abroad, where the piece has not been seen and does not compete with the original publication.

Digital Presence and Later Course

Featurewell's digital presence was its business: the website at featurewell.com carried the searchable archive, the abstracts, the editor registration and the licensing transactions. There was no print catalogue and no sales force calling on editors in the older syndicate style; the archive was always open. The United States trademark record for FEATUREWELL.COM later lapsed, with a status change recorded in 2012 for failure to file continued-use papers — an administrative marker, not by itself proof of closure, but consistent with a service whose most active, best-documented period was the 2000s, when its deals and roster were regularly reported in the trade press.

Significance

Featurewell's significance is that it translated the values of the old features syndicate — curation, rate-setting, collection and a standard split — into an online marketplace weighted in the writer's favour, and used the web's reach to sell second rights across borders at a scale individual freelancers could not achieve alone. Its roster, from Jimmy Breslin and Christopher Hitchens to the archives of Mother Jones, Reason, The Hill and TV Guide, showed that serious journalism could be the stock of an internet syndication service. For worldnm.com's agencies category, Featurewell represents the early-2000s reinvention of syndication: not a wire moving yesterday's news, but an archive making published journalism a durable, resalable asset for the journalists who created it.