Just over 17 years ago, I began my CBS Radio News Stamp Collecting Report. The first one distributed to stations on April 4 for use April 5-6 (or whenever they wanted). It also marked my return to doing on-air work, which I hadn’t done since I left National Public Radio in 1982 to go to CBS.

At the time, I was packaging a weekend feature package for CBS stations, and also tasked with combining two different packages into one. I kept pestering one of my supervisors about doing a stamp collecting feature, until one day he said, resignedly, “Yeah, go ahead.”

The features I was supervising were all over the place in terms of time, but I decided that stamp collecting was going to be a hard enough sell, so I decided all of mine would be 60 seconds (short enough to fit into a commercial window.

In 17 years, there have only been five repeats, so that’s almost 900 different pieces. All have run 59 to 61 seconds. If not, I re-record them until they fit.

A few years after I began the weekly feature, I began to do much shorter “news spots,” often previewing new issues coming out later in the week. These usually run on Sunday mornings when there isn’t much news.

I also got permission to put the feature on this website (every one since 1999 is there, I think), and eventually began to produce variations of the features for APS StampTalk and KNLS, a shortwave evangelical radio station that broadcasts to China and Russia. The VSC and KNLS versions are usually longer, and I read them more slowly, because I’m not trying to cram everything into 60 seconds.

The CBS Stamp Collecting Report and the other features in the weekend package are what is called syndicated: Stations can run them whenever they want, regularly or erratically, or even play them backward if they want. Since there are no commercials packaged with them, stations are not required to inform the network when or if they run any or all the features.

Early on, I discovered that one central California station was saving them up, and running them all once a month during the monthly stamp collecting talk show the manager hosted. After that, I stopped using specific date references like “this week” or “last Tuesday.”

I sometimes put in so much time producing a feature, with music and interviews and so on, that I’m really earning less than minimum wage – no exaggeration! I get the union minimum for each feature, and that won’t buy dinner at a nice restaurant! (The news spots, when they run on newscasts, pay better.)

However, I enjoy the production: I flatter myself that I used to be a pretty good radio producer, and sometimes I miss it. So I sometimes raise the bar just because I can.

The features are intended for a mass audience, not stamp collectors, and I used to run each script past a non-collector radio person to make sure they weren’t in Jargon. Stamp collectors have often told me I should be running three, four minutes and on National Public Radio. I don’t know that NPR wants them and even so, I prefer preaching the joys of stamp collecting to a wider audience.

At the same time, some radio news people have tried to convince me to dedicate the feature to postal service issues and news, and sometimes even UPS, FedEx and – oh, the pain! – coins. To them, I reply that it’s “The Stamp Collecting Report,” not “The Delivery Service Report.” While I’m never going to talk about plate varieties and Two-Cent Reds, there are going to be some editions that are mostly of interest to philatelists.

I think I’ve managed to walk the fine line between the mass market audience and the philatelic one, entertaining, amusing and informing both most of the time.

By the way, I now lay claim to the longest-running major network radio stamp collecting feature ever.

I’ll be happy to answer questions posted here.