Follow Me

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Jehovah's Witnesses To Announce Slimmer Magazines

During this Sunday's Watchtower study, a letter will be read to all congregations.  The letter states that, starting in January, the Watchtower and Awake! magazines will go from 32 pages, down to 16 pages.

Why?

Print has become a dead media, even for the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Moving operations online dramatically cuts costs.  Think about it...

How many of those magazines were legitimately "placed" out in field service?  My family would order a dozen copies of each issue.  Back in the day, we regularly had a stack of 50-60 magazines laying around the house.  It got to the point where we would leave an old Watchtower in the door, regardless of whether anyone was home or not.

A couple of years back, the organization scaled down their printing operations to only one "public" issue of the Watchtower and Awake! each month, with a second, super secret issue of the Watchtower made available to members of the Church.

Today, they claim that they're printing 42 million copies of each issue today.  I don't buy it.  If they are, the amount of waste is staggering.  Speaking for myself, I regularly shred 8-10 magazines a month...and that's just the ones I randomly come across in doctor's offices.  (Just imagine how easy it will be to shred Watchtowers that are half as thick.)

After years of having elders warn their congregations about the "dangers" of the internet and social media, it seems that the Society has reversed their position when it comes to their interests.  In the coming months, Jehovah's Witnesses are going to be consolidating their three websites into one, and focus the majority of their proselytizing to the World Wide Web.

Now, you can read the latest issue of the Watchtower, and have your favorite kiddie porn site open in the next tab.  That's a joke, of course.  We all know that only elders and ministerial servants watch kiddie porn.

You can see an image of the letter being read Sunday, below:



0 comments: