September 18, 2011 – Silver Spring, Maryland, United States….Mark A. Kellner, news editor Adventist Review
Seventh-day Adventist outreach magazine will soon be available on newsstands across the United States.
Message, originally published in 1898 as The Gospel Herald, has an African-American audience as its primary demographic, although the publication is well-received in other communities, said Samuel Thomas, Jr., the magazine’s marketing director.
“Since late 2007, the marketing department of Message in conjunction with the editor, Washington Johnson II, has pursued a single focus of reaching the masses of our metropolitan centers more effectively,” Thomas said. “A constant objective, this mission has been coupled with persistent prayer.”
“What began as a casual contact to the marketing office of Message from Ingram Publishing promises to break open the urban market for non-Christian and other Christian receivers to engage our publication,” Thomas noted. Magazine editor Johnson added, “This is a day we never anticipated, but it shows God’s power to get the message out in these last hours of earth’s history.”
Thomas said the move to include newsstand distribution has two goals: “First of all, to receive an increased presence in the general readership, and second to expand the capability of Message to prove its evangelistic value among its members. The more we prove its value, the more we have the capacity to expand its application and complement outreach projects.”
Message has a paid circulation of 56,000 copies, Thomas explained, and generally prints an additional 19,000 copies of each issue, which he said “sells out” for use in evangelistic and other outreaches. In the past two years three separate Message magazine outreaches-during the 2009 inaugural of U.S. president Barack Obama; the 2010 General Conference session in Atlanta; and the 2011 United Youth Congress in Orlando, Florida-have seen the distribution of 100,000 special issues to the public.
“When you have an attractive journal as well as one that captures current events and issues, it will resonate with the public, especially those who are non-Christians,” Thomas said.
