Interestingly in the presentation section it gives options to offer 'this months offer of the Watchtower' or 'this months offer of the Awake'. I thought starting in January there would only be one of the magazines available and the other magazine being published and offered the next month.
I think the intention is to release a new issue every month, That issue will rotate between being a Watchtower or an Awake. But remember, the issues will no longer be prominently dated. So even if, for example, the new magazine published in February is the Awake, publishers will still be offering the January Watchtower in the month of February. The intention is to have the magazines date-less - like pseudo-brochures. That way there will no longer be "back-issues" for publishers to discard because of being wary of placing an old magazine that shows its date by virtue of it being prominently printed on the cover.
Watchtower knows that many magazines stay back and are wasted because of being back-dated. By making the magazines seemingly dateless, they hope to eliminate the "back-dated" stereotype so that much more magazines are placed and congs. monthly demands will thus reduce a bit, saving them on printing costs.
But I suspect that this latest change is just a transition to another change - eliminating one of the magazines altogether and printing a single named magazine every month, or maybe printing a single 32-page quarterly - once every 3 months, maybe even with a new name that includes the word "quarterly" to make it sound meaty - which will effectively reduce their magazine printing by 33%, the equivalent of printing less than 11 pages per month!
I suspect this to be the case because the latest change just seems too unorthodox to be a well thought-out long term adjustment. It seems more like an emergency stabilization/transition measure until they come up with a better long-term strategy.