by Lloyd A. de Vries
The CBS version of my weekly radio stamp collecting feature will end on the final day of 2017. CBS News, Radio, has canceled the feature, saying no station was playing it anymore. (That may be news to friends who say they were hearing it every Sunday morning on KNX Los Angeles.)
It debuted April 4, 1997, and has been a part of the Weekend Feature Package offered to CBS Radio Network stations ever since. In its 20¾ years, there were only five repeats! And all 1,000+ ran between 59 and 61 seconds.
Since 1999, a version of the feature has also been available on my website, The Virtual Stamp Club. Eventually, there were two basic versions every week: The minute-long piece, for CBS and breaks in the web-radio show “APS StampTalk;” and a version that was often longer, which ran on VSC and KNLS, an evangelical shortwave service.
The pieces were always written for a mass audience, not stamp collectors, and rarely used philatelic jargon. In fact, they rarely used “philatelic” — making it hard to talk about the bigest stamp collecting organization in the U.S., the American PHILATELIC Society! It was kept to one minute, so that commercial radio stations would run it.
On the left, as I interviewed the head of Scott Publishing for radio, he snapped a picture of me for Scott Stamp Monthly.
Nearly all the pieces were positive and upbeat. The major exceptions were a few complaining about the U.S. Postal Service, which every collector of modern U.S. stamps does.
On the right, I interviewed supermodel Heidi Klum in 2002.
My plans for “the feature” aren’t firm at this point, but I do intend to continue it on The Virtual Stamp Club site. However, I’m not sure it will remain weekly.
I won’t miss the pressure of having to have a new piece (and a new subject) every Thursday morning, or producing features in advance if I were traveling. On the other hand, I had a great deal of fun with them and they were often more creative than my “day job” radio work.
A real loss for our hobby, Lloyd. Many of us will definitely miss it! Thank you so much for all the work you did on the show–even though it was “fun work.” – Vera Felts, ATA
Certainly a loss to many. Thank you for all the time and effort and for sharing our hobby with countless millions-including the special versions for APS Stamp Talk. Always nice to have a real professional on the show.
This is a long reply, Sorry I am just putting my feelings into this issue.
The loss of your broadcast will be noticeable to those that have found your link or know of its existence. I had returned to Phalalthy six years ago and had been looking for sources of information to enrich my knowledge of the hobby. I have found three podcasts, and I follow two of them. The one from England was only related to British Commonwealth stamp issues and had a large section on local stamp shows. The two American podcasts that are still active are; “APS Stamp Talk” and “Stamp Show Here Today.”
There are two noticeable problems with broadcast and podcast within community our hobby. The first is being the age group of many stamp collectors. I was involved in a stamp club in a western state, and when I wrote an article about podcasts for stamp collectors, I found that the cell phone technology was very challenging to most of the members. I could not help everyone work their phone’s operating system as I only know how to work with an iPhone system. I had a bit of better luck when I later published the computer links to these podcasts but not much more. So our current participant in the hobby has limited ability to deal with current technology.
The second problem is happening almost everywhere, the sharing of resources for information. Remember a scene in the movie; “Miracle on 34th Street” where the department store Santa tells a customer that Macy does not have what the child wants for Christmas, but Macy’s competitor down the street has it. Santa Claus almost got fired for not steering the customer to buy something else at Macy’s. Our hobby has many collectors that are very secretive about what they are collecting, and that is almost the same with all forms of media within the hobby. The hobby is going through a significant slow down to nearly to the point of death. Every type of the media within Philately should be reaching for every thread they can reach hoping it leads to a rope that pulls them and the hobby out of this quicksand that is currently absorbing the hobby. When I was in that stamp club mentioned earlier, we wanted to increase and retain membership. One of the ways that helped was to list any member selling stamps online in the newsletter. If the member ran a stamp store, they got a free two-inch ad in the newsletter. Maybe if the printed publications had a block buried within their pages of all known podcast or broadcast, even they listed major organizations that had publications like “The American Philatelist” from the American Philatelic Society or “Topical Time” from American Topical Association or others it would help hold what is left of the hobby. These listings should also be reciprocative of each other to be fair.
Something needs to be done by the industry if they want to survive besides wringing their hands and saying, “Oh my the hobby is dead, and there was no wake or funeral.”
Thank you. I’ll still be producing the feature, just not one a week, and nothing will air on CBS radio (commercial radio). But for outreach, maybe commercial radio, especially on a network with an older audience, wasn’t that important.
Let us know when it happens, Thank You,
Jim Capelle