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PASTOR'S REPORT, July 16, 1979
Page 7
As a final reminder, please don't forget to send those Festival addresses
to Sherwin McMichael and/or Rod Matthews by July 21 so you will be able to
receive the films of Mr. Armstrong's moving Feast messages.
--Larry Omasta, Television Production
P.T. NEWSSTAND EFFECTIVENESS
I've mentioned several times in this report what a great job all Plain
Truth Newsstand co-ordinators are doing. Month in and month out the unsung
heroes of the newsstand program keep plugging away. It is still our most
valuable program in terms of gaining new readers of our literature.
We must always be trying to improve our newsstand response by being aware
of waste or saturation indicated by the magazines not being picked up from
one month to the other. With cost effectiveness in mind, Boyd Leeson
recently put some figures together for me that shows that a simple one
percent increase in response from our newsstand program means that wespend
$20,000 less per month to maintain our present level of responses. This
means that every little effort that the newsstand teams can make to improve
their local response really pays off. With this in mind we are working on
a totally new program to help those in the field improve the handling of
their Plain Truth allocations. More on that later.
Just met with Frank Brown, who is in town for the International Conference.
It's going to be a busy week for everybody. We are preparing filM for
a European version of the Introductory P.T., which we discussed at some
length.
--Roger Lippross, Publishing Services
ON THE WORLD SCENE
MR. CARTER'S CALL TO ARMS IN THE "ENERGY WAR": In his most emotional speech
to date, President Carter, on Sunday evening July 15, called upon the
American people to "commit ourselves to a rebirth of the American spirit,"
and specifically, to "win the war on the energy problem" and rescue the
nation from its bondage to foreign oil producers, who now supply nearly half
of the nation's oil. "Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to
unite the nation."
Reaction both at home and abroad to the president's nationally televised
address, and his two follow-up speeches the next day in Kansas City and
Detroit, generally can be summed up this way: long on emotions but short
and repetitive on specifics.
The President actually gave two speeches on Sunday, the first one being an
impassionate plea for moral resurgence in the nation as a whole--though very
short on specifics here as well. He probed no causes and gave no solutions,
choosing only to outline the symptoms of America's post-Vietnam, postÂ
Watergate malaise. These symptoms of America's "crisis of confidence" are
everywhere, he said: "For the first time, a majority of our people believe
that the next five years will be worse than the past five years ....There
is growing disrespect for government, for the churches, schools, the news
media and other institutions."