I had thought about this subject way back in the '70s...why wouldn't they want to make the Awake more of a "general interest" magazine? It always was said to be something as much for the outside world as for the JWs. It sure might have made it easier to sell at the doors - imagine if it looked almost as good as a National Geographic, or at least like a Readers Digest, for low cost...
(of course, the side point was always made that "real" publishers probably would not want to read Time or Newsweek - so they needed a "news magazine" too.)
Now, we find it to be cut back to once a month, and if I read the post trends, focusing even more on bad news and time of the end. And, wasn't that horror of "kids who died without blood" an Awake article?
Makes you kind of want to see a good old-fashioned article about say, the "cotton industry" or maybe the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.
No wonder even the witnesses can hardly read this junk, let alone people they sell it to or who happen to find an old one in a laundramat.
James