Whatever happened to my vinyl records?

The autumn collecting season begins in earnest after Labor Day. If you are planning to submit club news, show news, new wooden nickel and medal offerings to Numismatic News, it would be helpful if you could do it in electronic form to me at the e-mail address in the lower left corner of this page.

As we get further and further into the Internet Age, old equipment wears out, staffing patterns shift and the upshot is that it is becoming more and more difficult to handle old-fashioned snapshots and typed or photocopied pages.

Since I can read and type, I can still grab information off hard copy with no real problem, but photos are another story.

This doesn’t mean we are unable to accept material in nonelectronic form, but it does mean that such formats slow the process down. And, if I happen to be on a tough deadline and I have the choice between images that are already in electronic form and a story with snapshots that need scanning, I am going to have to opt for the faster material to get the paper out on time. Changes like this affect how the paper is put together from top to bottom.

Last year we disappointed longtime fans of free classified ads when they were removed from the weekly print edition of Numismatic News. Free classifieds are still available online.

What’s the difference? A now disbanded staff of typesetters. As more and more material came to us in electronic format, it made the material that did not come in that manner more and more costly to process. (We have to pay a typesetter whether that person is actually setting type or not.) Being occupied typing free classified ads did nothing to redress the problem. It makes people look busy, but it did nothing to generate revenue, which every business needs to survive. With online classifieds, the person who places the ad does the typing.

Because of the recession, cost cutting like this is the name of the game. This is nothing new. I have lived through other recessions.

Naturally, changes to old patterns of doing things are disruptive. They take some getting used to. Believe me, you are not alone if you feel that way. But the good news is we will make the changes and we will be the stronger for it.

The ads that are appearing in the classified section each week are from persons and companies who are paying to seek your business. They have faith in the hobby’s future and are willing to put good money behind that faith.

I remember when the Coinage Act of 1965 brought us clad coinage. It was a wrenching change. The coin finds era came to a close soon thereafter. Some hobbyists declared that the hobby was finished.
But it was the old-timers who had experienced other changes who dismissed the naysayers. One of them, Dick Yeo, better known as R.S. Yeoman, was one of the optimists. He was proved right. The hobby evolved. New approaches to collecting were tried and found to be satisfying. Let’s keep moving forward together as changes are once again the order of the day.