28 Sep 2010, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States…Ansel Oliver/ANN
The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s oldest publishing house yesterday announced a major reorganization, including new management and cuts in staff and salaries to stem major ongoing financial losses.
Executives at Review and Herald Publishing Association project a $2.4 million loss this year. The Hagerstown, Maryland-based organization has lost money for the past four years despite roughly $27 million in annual revenue, a spokesperson said.
“We can’t continue like this,” the institution’s president, Mark Thomas, told employees during a Monday assembly, according to a company release.
Thomas announced a “revitalization plan,” which includes reducing the number of employees to about 170, down from the current 206, said Kim Peckham, a spokesperson.
Redundant departments will be combined and most fulltime design positions will be outsourced, Peckham said.
The organization’s Book and Periodical divisions each have their own advertising, marketing and editorial departments. The two divisions will be merged and duplicated departments will be combined.
With yesterday’s announcement, the association’s board named several new officers. Graham Barham will serve as chief financial officer. Barham orchestrated a turnaround of the church’s Stanborough Press in England, the release said.
Dwight Hall was named vice president of the soon-to-be merged Marketing/Sales department. Hall is a businessman and founder of Remnant Publications, a Chicago-based publisher and distributor of Christian books.
Dwain Esmond was appointed vice president for the Editorial Division. Esmond serves as editor of Insight, a Christian magazine for youth. The board also named John Gay as vice president of graphics.
The Association’s board also directed the sale of underutilized assets to eliminate corporate debt and raise capital for new initiatives, the release said.
The revamp follows an organizational change in April, when Thomas was appointed president.
“We’re going through these painful changes because we want to be more relevant, more useful to the church as a whole,” Peckham said.
New leadership is expected to more aggressively introduce electronic products and Web-based publishing, Peckham said. While the organization has developed some products for Amazon’s Kindle, a hand-held reading device, it hasn’t kept up to speed with new media, he said.
“New vice presidents will look at our product line to better fit the transformation of the publishing landscape,” Peckham said.
Established in 1849 by church co-founder James White, Review and Herald is a major supplier to Adventist Book Center retail outlets. It publishes many denominational magazines and books and supplies software and other media.
