Q. Good morning! Are syndicated newspaper articles marked as such in footnotes? It seems somewhat misleading to refer simply to an article in, say, The Indianapolis Star, when it was published in papers around the country and I just happened to see it in the Star because that’s the database to which I have access. I have periodically searched for the answer to this question in the Q&A and haven’t seen one. Please let me know your thoughts, thanks!
A. Though Chicago doesn’t currently require you to include information about syndication, you can always provide additional context for a cited source beyond the bare citation. If the article that you’re citing has been distributed via syndication to other publications—and you think readers should know this—then feel free to say so, either in your text (where you could simply refer to “the syndicated article” when you introduce it) or as commentary following your citation in a note (as in CMOS 13.40).
If you do mention syndication, consider citing an additional source that would confirm this, unless that information appears with the article (in which case your Star citation will do double duty).