by Truth and Justice 10 Replies latest jw friends
Hi to all!
My question is How many watchtower and awake magazines do the witnesses receive thru the year? My Mother and I stop going about 30 years ago, my sister does attend still, and she says that they will receive 3 watchtowers and 3 awakes a year. Is that true? Or is that for the new year?
I know from all my reading they have cut back an awful lot.
Thanks to all for any info you can give on this subject! I was tired of doing a search.
Truth and Justice
This is for the new year, for the public that is. Presently they receive one a month, alternately Watchtower and Awake. You are correct they have cut back a great deal.
I'm afraid your sister is using a bit of ' theocratic warfare' on you, as Witnesses term porkies!!
Thanks for your help on that
Currently they have available -
1 study Watchtower per month
1 simplified study Watchtower per month
1 public Awake and 1 public Watchtower on alternate months (6 of each per year)
As of January, 2018 they will have
1 study Watchtower per month in semi simplified language
3 Awakes per year
3 public Watchtowers per year
This means that they won't have a new Watchtower or Awake readily available for their regular return visits so their approach will be very different.
I was wondering, for the average publisher who does 10 hours of door to door work per month, how many mags (including study mags) would they currently be obtaining per month and what would you anticipate this to be in 2018?
I remember when they were shipped in the mail in a plan brown wrapper with your address typed with a dot matrix printer. It seemed as if we received either an Awake or Watchtower every week. My parents had a huge stack of them piled up in the laundry room.
I wonder how that is going to go when someone gets a rag that they are not comfortable with placing. Back in the 1990s, you got a bad rag, you could always use a different article out of it, or the other rag. I have had a few of those--either the article was impossible to explain to someone as to why it mattered, or it was so far against the laws of nature that I could not place it lest I found myself facing that law of nature myself.
However, with fewer rags, you are going to run into this problem more often. Someone could be naturally gay, and run into a rag that bashes homosexuality. There is a good chance they are going to have to place it using this article anyways, at risk of looking like a hypocrite. Not only that, they are not going to get a fresh rag in 2 weeks. They are stuck with it for the whole of two months.
Plus, one could adjust one's field circus schedule to place fewer of the offending rags and go out more when a better rag comes out (say, one that bashes something they are already against, like smoking). Try that with only one issue per two months.
My parents had a huge stack of them piled up in the laundry room.
Everyone had a stack of magazines. The Watchtower promoted the fact that the printed millions of magazines every week - they attempted to create the image that the magazines were the most widely read magazines in the world. However, most of these magazines went no further than the proverbial stacks found in each publisher's home. This is a classic description of a fraud scheme called "channel stuffing."
@exjwlemming
I remember those days too. Both magazines were 32 pages, twice per month, sent by mail.
Then they did away with the mail thing in the late 90s. It was apparently too costly to pay the bulk mail cost and they now expected JW's to deliver them in their day-to-day preaching activities, before that, we were encouraged to leave magazines and try to set them up with a subscription, there was even a cut-out on the last page of the magazine to request a subscription.
Then afterwards we were setting up "magazine routes", this must have been very impactful because they could cut down the amount of paper printed because no way could you service all your magazine routes in two weeks, especially in remote areas, I remember having to travel hours in "service" and only go around all my routes once every 3 months. Eventually they even started telling in the KM's not to save up and give people a stack of magazines, only to give the current ones and don't give your routes to others (which was common to even out the load among pioneers) and don't leave the rags in people's mailboxes anymore, only leave them if you can actually talk to them.
I think those cost cuts were as if not more impactful as last few years' cuts because suddenly hundreds of "subscriptions" fell off and they were only printing and shipping to the local congregations and how much pairs could ~400-1000 man-hours per month deliver in an area?
My parents had a huge stack of them piled up in the laundry room.Everyone had a stack of magazines. The Watchtower promoted the fact that the printed millions of magazines every week - they attempted to create the image that the magazines were the most widely read magazines in the world. However, most of these magazines went no further than the proverbial stacks found in each publisher's home. This is a classic description of a fraud scheme called "channel stuffing."
I remember this. As a kid my parents had, literally, cupboards full of Watchtower and Awake magazines going back like 15 years. They'd be an apostates wet dream to get hold of nowadays.
I myself when i left home had shelves in the shed full of magazines. Somehow it seem disrespectful or sacrilegious to throw them away.
I read all of the replies, and appreciate it very much. I too remember getting those magazines in that brown paper and my Mother had it read in 1 hour. Now I read cooking magazines.
