On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 19:42:27 GMT, "Dave"
wrote:
snip
I offered to the local newspaper, the Democrat & Chronicle, to write
for them a short weekly stamp collecting feature. For free no less! Sorry,
not interested. I can remember as a boy the Sunday newspaper had a regular
stamp feature; part "how-to" and part new issues news. Haven't seen
anything like that since.
When I lived in Hong Kong the South China Daily Post had a regular
stamp feature, sometimes several times a week.
snip
You might want to make the offer to a local weekly paper.
They pay little but you can get in more easily.
Guess what... research shows they are read
and read more than the big daily papers.
I'm reading an interesting book, *The First Casualty -- From the Crimea to
Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker*.
During the American Civil War, newspapers were so desperate for stories that
they paid telegraph operators to write for them, and it didn't really matter
if the stories were factual. In fact, these early "correspondents" were
fired in some cases if they didn't report "news" on slow days; they were
guaranteed a job if they wrote whatever came into their heads, whether or
not it had any basis in fact. Thus there were stories about Union soldiers
playing football with the heads of Confederate soldiers, and a report that
Atlanta had been captured -- a week before the battle for Atlanta had even
started. Generals were reported to have been killed when in fact they hadn't
received a scratch. One "reporter" wrote a detailed, "eye-witness" account
of a battle that had occurred miles away from him; his story, which had
little basis in fact, was applauded in London as the finest reporting of the
war.
Today (even though we recently had the debacle of the New York Times
reporter fabricating front-page stories), newspapers have the opposite
problem: there is way too much news for them to carry in limited space. They
literally don't need columns about stamps. Moreover, every story costs them
money to print, even though the copy itself might be free, and they have to
have room for ads. Combine these facts of life with an editor's conviction
that there isn't enough interest in stamps to warrant a column, and we're
sunk.
(There's another factor too, and that the overall economy: Brian Grant Duff
at The Bay Coins & Stamps is auctioning an award-winning AIDS Awareness
stamp collection put together by Blair Henshaw, who died of AIDS in 2002.
Blair was responsible for lobbying Canada Post to issues its AIDS Awareness
stamp and was he was a member of my stamp club, the B.C. Philatelic Society,
which has been meeting in Vancouver since 1919. Brian called the editor of
The Vancouver Sun to ask him if he'd run a story about the auction; two
other small papers had already done so. The Sun's editor told Brian that he
didn't have the manpower since half of their editorial staff had recently
been laid off. You can read more about Blair Henshaw on our club web page;
go to http://www.bcphilatelic.org.
I once asked both the daily and the weekly papers in Prince George, B.C., if
they would be interested in a "How to" photography column. I was teaching a
photography course at the time; I am a journalist; I was quite well known in
the community as a teacher and photographer. Their response in both cases
was a firm "No." The reason? "There's not enough interest in photography."
If that was the attitude about photography, what would their response have
been about a stamp collecting column! Laughter?
Bottom line: I don't think we can count on media support of our hobby. Show
and Tell is probably the best route. Our club picked up six new members at
VANPEX 2003 on this last weekend.
Bob
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