"News & Notes" at Four Years

Now in its fourth year, SPMC's weekly blog "News & Notes" chugs along, appearing weekly both on the Society's website and as an email sent to some six hundredonline subscribers. At this point, the blog is a routine production that takes me a few hours each week to piece together. But to call it routine doesn't at all imply thatI've grown indifferent to it. To explain, I thought it would be worthwhile to recount how "News & Notes" came about and how it's put together.

Like many other enterprises, the Society entered the Internet Age by developing an online presence for its members. A good website should both serve its members and reflecttheir activities. In my experience, any website that doesn't offer routine evidence of updating and change raises a red flag about the energy of the organization behind it.So, when I got involved with SPMC governance some four years ago, I thought that adding a little bit of yeast to the website seemed like a good first project.

The question was, what would that project look like? By temperament, I'm a conservative, which means that when I think about doing something, I look to see how it hasalready been done well, and do likewise. In this instance, Wayne Homren's E-Sylum really stands out to my mind as the best example for how an online presence canbridge the virtual and physical worlds of collecting, while encouraging active engagement from a discerning readership.

Other online aggregators, such as Scott Purvis's CoinWeek or Ursula Kampmann's CoinsWeekly, are good at developing and publishing content, but thatwould be beyond the capacity of a single individual like myself, working only a few hours a week. Also, unlike Homren, I don't have the time or ability to pull togethernumismatic and bibliomaniacal (?) news, provide perspective on it, and cultivate the online community that contributes so much worthwhile material to his site. To that extent,E-Sylum serves at once as a news aggregator, a publisher of original content, and a bulletin board for a lively constituency of collectors and scholars. It's in aclass by itself.

If I couldn't aspire to do all that, I reckoned, then a simple approximation of one part of it might do, and that was the aggregating of news links, without providingcommentary, about anything relevant to paper money and its collection. And that's basically what "News & Notes" is.

My original plan, and one which I have mostly stuck with, was to divide up the weekly news about paper money into three categories: (1) paper money and currency as acollectible and as a factor in public affairs; (2) the industry that produces paper money-banknote printers, security paper producers, and ancillary firms; and (3) any criminalactivity associated in some way with paper money. This last category includes, naturally, counterfeiting, but also any frauds and scams that involve paper money as a prominentfocus.

The weekly routine-and a routine it has to be-begins with Google News alerts set to selected keywords, with links sent to my email inbox. After working through those, I turn tocollector and industry websites for additional material. Finally, if there's time, I'll nose around for sources in French, Spanish, and German.

Of the three types of news, the first is the easiest to sort. Numismatic publications provide feature stories, auction news, and other items. Some are more link-friendly thanothers, but that is their commercial choice. A few collectors' blogs are impressively up-to-date in their coverage of new banknote issues. More broadly, general news aboutcurrency-for example Venezuela's monetary travails, or India's demonetization of high-value banknotes-invariably shows up in the weekly links, and incidentallyunderscore how relevant money and currency remains to a wider public audience.

Industry-related links have tended to be fewer in number, consisting of press releases by companies, analyst reports, or other news related to the technical production of papercurrency.

Finally, the theme of money and crime proved more haphazard than I'd have thought. Yes, counterfeiting is a chronic problem, but most cases of it are squalid anduninteresting, in the sense that any fool with a printer can produce some illegal facsimile of currency. Thus, the blog has focused on more systematic counterfeitingoperations-Peru or North Korea, for examples-and on currency- related crimes that involve more than the ordinary level of perfidy, or about which there might be some interestingtwist.

Together, those three elements make up "News & Notes" in its current form. If you are not a subscriber to the email, you can find the blog version posted every Tuesday onthe SPMC website. If you are a subscriber, check your spam folder in case you are missing it!

To read News & Notes, see:
https://www.spmc.org/news-and-notes