We can always count on APS members!
Bill Silvester
The small but mighty APS content team needs to produce a huge amount of relevant material for all the society’s platforms. This creates quite a daily conundrum. We’re working on each month’s issue of The American Philatelist while also writing stories for stamps.org. Then there’s social media, which requires additional effort to decide what kind of content will engage users on each platform.
Sometimes, we find ourselves having to make difficult decisions. Last summer, we stopped producing the “Worldwide New Issues” column. In October, one of our members expressed disappointment in our decision. I replied, “We’re open to bringing it back, if any readers are interested in helping to gather the content and write it.”
It didn’t take long to hear from APS member William Silvester. Bill is an accomplished free lance writer with a number of books and articles to his credit, including philatelic guides and handbooks.
Take a look at Bill’s first “Worldwide New Issues” column. We appreciate his help!
Speaking of content…
Recently, we launched a brand-new APS News section on stamps.org. We are dramatically increasing the number of stories available on our website and decided to improve your reading experience too. Our members come first, so if you are logged into stamps.org, you can read member-exclusive content, including articles from The American Philatelist, while on the go. We also want to make stamps.org a destination for potential APS members, so we’ve increased the amount of stamp-related content along with teasers of AP content. The design work on this section was done by Ross Jones, in his new role as Project Manager. Ross will continue to improve other sections of stamps.org. We welcome your feedback.
On the horizon…
APS video is one of our priorities for the new year. We hope you find APS video partner, Graham Beck’s “Exploring Stamps” features interesting! Additional videos will start appearing on the APS YouTube channel soon. We are training on a new platform to make it easier and more efficient for our team to produce high quality segments.
In the January issue of the AP, I asked for members to join our Content Review Committee. We are pleased by the response, but there’s still time to offer your services! If you have time to evaluate proposed articles for publication and help review philatelic claims for accuracy, send an email (tloebig@stamps.org) with the subject “Content Review Committee.”
Thanks to our members for your support of our content team!