Amos Press name change to Amos Media reflects need to embrace the digital age

Effective July 1, Amos Press Inc. officially changes its name to Amos Media Company.

The old name harkened back to the days when Amos produced exclusively print publications, some of them on a press housed at the firm’s headquarters in Sidney, Ohio.

Those days effectively ended in the early years of the last decade, when the press was sold and the printing of Linn’s and other Amos publications was outsourced.

In a June 30 announcement to all Amos employees, president Jeff Greisch said: “The name change, while not overly dramatic, is very important nonetheless.

“Amos Media better reflects our company and its mission today, and the name is more ideally suited to today’s information and advertising marketplace.”

Several days after the name change became official, a new company logo was unveiled.

The logo features the stylized letters “AM” (for Amos Media) above the words Amos Media. We are still finalizing the color palette for the logo, so we can’t show it just yet.

This new icon will begin appearing in publication mastheads and elsewhere in the coming weeks.

When the Internet took the world by storm in the late 1990s, Amos saw possibilities for digital products and growth, but was slow to react to the impact of cyberspace delivery of information during the next decade or so.

In summer 2013, a new management team with extensive multimedia publishing experience was hired to chart a course that would allow Amos Media to become an established player in the world of digital publishing.

Company leadership saw this as an essential step to ensure that Amos and its brands would grow, thrive and capture a larger audience in the digital age.

Myriad changes have already taken place. Chief among them has been the development of a content management system (CMS) that allows rapid dissemination of news and other content through our publication websites.

Initial rollout of the CMS occurred in March, with our sister publication Coin World.

Tandem with the CMS development is a complete overhaul of our websites. To get an idea of the new look and feel, check out coinworld.com. A similar rollout will take place next in our automotive division, which produces Cars and Parts.

Plans call for Linn’s to have its new CMS and website in the coming months.

In the meantime, we have made improvements to the existing Linns.com website that allow us to publish breaking news and other content much more rapidly than in the past.

Links to our stories also are posted on a set schedule to the Linn’s page on Facebook (www.facebook.com/linnsStampNews) and to the Linn’s Twitter account, @LinnsStampNews.

We encourage you to “like” our Facebook page, which is closing in on 1,000 likes as of this writing. And please “follow” Linn’s on Twitter.

If you hear of breaking stamp-hobby news, you can use these social media sites to alert us. We regularly monitor posts to both sites.

You may also reach us via e-mail: linnseditorial@linns.com.

For those of you who look forward to a print copy of Linn’s each week, there is no need to worry.

Print publications will continue to be a part of the Amos product mix.