One of the great changes in our modern world has been the decline of specialty periodical publishing. In philately, the result has been very dramatic. Thirst years ago, the top ten stamp journals in the United States had nearly half a million subscribers. Today the top three (and because of the Internet there are only three left) are less than 75,000.
The three that remain serve different niches and even in their restricted formats, these magazines are threatened. Linns Stamp News is a weekly, and the American Philatelist and the American Stamp Dealer and Collector are monthlies. Linns has been around nearly 100 years. It is published weekly and in the days before EBAY and the Internet, it was an ad rag, often boasting hundreds of pages of advertising price lists around a core of news that seemed there mainly to meet postal regulations to qualify for the preferred second class newspaper postage rate. In my first year out of school (1975) Linns had a subscriber base of over 100,000. Today it is closer to 30,000 as the Internet has eaten in to its market. Linns runs some lightweight columns and has new issue and show news. It was once indispensable if you were a stamp professional. Today it is still useful to keep tabs on the daily and weekly happenings in the hobby.
The American Philatelist is the current dean of philatelic publications, and is the monthly journal of the American Philatelic Society (APS). It has been published for over 120 years and its list of editors would comprise a philatelic Hall of Fame. They include Jim Chemi, Daniel Vooys, David Lidman, Dick Sine, and Bill Welch and Barb Boal who between them probably account for 75 years of editorship. The magazine is somewhat up market, with well illustrated scholarly and pseudo scholarly articles . Its easy to read and it is kind of the Psychology Today of philatelic writing, straddling the market between advanced amateur to the modestly serious. The American Stamp Dealer and Collector is the new kid on the block and I like it. It is originally the journal of the American Stamp Dealers Association and has expanded its market with fun and interesting stories. Its editor Randy Neil is an old stamp hand (he was the President of the APS for a while) and he solicits articles from some of the most able writers in the hobby.
Even these three magazines are under considerable pressure . Stamp collecting remains popular but the interests of collectors have changed. Most stamp collectors today are new issue collectors. Postal agencies have made it so easy. Subscriptions bring you new issues monthly, charged to your credit card, and the stamp issuing nations of the world issue hundreds of thousands of philatelic souvenirs (called stamps) each year with total face value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. When old timers lament the fact that there aren’t as many serious philatelists as there was, the reason is simple. Collectors today can have their philatelic desires sated by the plethora of new stamps sent in perfect condition to their homes each month. It is hard for the traditional hobby to compete. There are probably still as many serious philatelists today as there ever was but an increasing number of newer collectors to the hobby are astonished to find that there are so many collectors who never have bought a mint stamp from a postal agency. Stamp journals will continue to feel the pressure from on line news sources. Expect in less than ten years that there will only be the American Philatelist remaining and that magazine, free to members of the society, will continue to be the membership premium for the APS for as long as that organization continues in existence.