Service numbers are gone

Samuel Thorsen

I just stumbled over the October issue of Our Kingdom Ministry in Norwegian.

The service report numbers are no longer printed. Why not? And do they still print the numbers in your language?

They removed them from the Australian kingdom ministry as well. They just give "Service Highlights" now, like an increase of 10% in East Timor (which means 66 publisers this month, 60 last month....) Cheers, Mattieu

PYRAMIDSCHEME

Been doing that for a while. Not sure why.

PYRAMIDSCHEME

Been doing that for a while. Not sure why.

VM44

Does anyone know if the "growth" statistics are slowing down, or even becoming negative?

If that is the case, then that might be why the numbers are no longer appearing.

Samuel Thorsen

Yes, they might protect the flock from the bad news...

XPeterX

No.The GB oughs to give a global year report so that JW's are aware of what's going on.

alanv

I believe that Norways publishers are going up on average 1% per year. Certainly nothing to write home about.

The society have stopped publishing all the figures monthly because there would be a lot of discouragement if they showed the numbers going down. Europe in general is making next to no progress these days, whereas other parts of the earth still show a small increase

andy5421

they save it for the yearbbook I think

factfinder

They discontinued publishing it in the US edition a while back too.

Notice they discontinued over the years : Branch letter, theocratic news, New publications available and Service Report.

They stopped publishing edition figures in the books beginning in 2005. Remember they used to give the total number of copies printed and number of languages, except for cong. books. I always found this information interesting. Since 2005 the books simply state: 2005 printing, 2006 printing, etc.

I think they want to downplay how large a publishing operation they have- perhaps to avoid taxes? It's very rare that they provide even in the Yearbooks, how many books and magazines they printed worldwide for the year. And on occasion when they do, there are contradictions with other figures they had published.

Much is being kept secret that they used to always make public.

And the printing figure for each issue of The Watchtower is misleading. It says in the public edition that 39,600,000 are printed of each issue- but this figure is the total number of copies of The Watchtower for the month- including the Study Edition.

They have been constantly trying to cut down production to save money. Awake! went monthly to cut production in half, then 2 editions of The Watchtower to cut down production further still. Instead of 4 issues a month to distribute door to door, now only 2. Thus magazine production was reduced by about 500 million copies per year as compared to before Awake! went monthly. Before the change about 1.2 billion magazines were printed, now about 900 million a year.

I have a feeling in time even the average printing of the magazines will no longer be provided in the magazines. There will be more and more information kept from the congregation and the public as time goes on.

Remember when the KM used to include a 4 page insert most months? Notice how rare that is now!

Service numbers are gone

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