FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

10/22/2015

Contacts:
Bill McCloskey, SPJ At-Large Director, 301-652-7583, bmcclos325@aol.com
Maggie LaMar, SPJ Communications Coordinator, 317-920-4785, mlamar@spj.org

INDIANAPOLIS—The United States Postal Service is considering a joint request from the Society of Professional Journalists and Radio Television and Digital News Association to create a commemorative postage stamp to honor the late CBS News Anchor and Managing Editor Walter Cronkite.

SPJ At-Large Board member Bill McCloskey of Bethesda, Maryland, recalled a previous Postal Service first-day-of-issue ceremony for stamps honoring women journalists held during the SPJ convention in 2002 and wondered if there was another event that might be commemorated with a similar ceremony.

"That year convention attendees in Fort Worth flocked to the elaborate Postal Service ceremony staged as a convention session and bought souvenir envelopes to have canceled with the new stamps. In researching the idea I noted Mr. Cronkite's 100th birth anniversary, Nov. 6, 1916, and asked leaders of RTDNA and SPJ to get behind the idea," said McCloskey, himself a stamp collector.

According to the USPS, “under consideration” means that “the stamp is held for additional review and consideration, with no commitment that it will become a future stamp.” There are still months of other stages to complete before any developmental work begins.

Other journalists honored with their own stamps in recent years include Martha Gellhorn, who covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War; John Hersey, whose most famous work “Hiroshima” described the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on that Japanese city on Aug. 6, 1945; George Polk, a CBS radio reporter who covered civil war in Greece and whose 1948 murder remains shrouded in mystery; Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist and news director for the Spanish language television station KMEX in Los Angeles who was killed by a tear gas projectile fired by a sheriff’s deputy while covering anti-war rioting in 1970; and Eric Sevareid, a newspaper reporter who was recruited to CBS radio by Edward R. Murrow and covered World War II.

Under Postal Service rules, people cannot be honored on a stamp until five years after their death, except for former presidents who traditionally are commemorated with a stamp in the year after they die.

Help make this stamp a reality by writing your support to the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee:

Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee
USPS
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW
Room 3300
Washington, DC 20260-3501

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