What we're about

Feb. 3, 2003
In 21 years as an Oil & Gas Journal editor, I have heard that question often.

"Where do you get the material you publish?"

In 21 years as an Oil & Gas Journal editor, I have heard that question often.

Answers may vary by editor and by the part of the magazine for which he or she works.

But trying to provide some answers here will allow me to pick up a favorite theme covered last year in this space (OGJ, Feb. 4, 2002, p. 17): How Oil & Gas Journal is distinctive and respected.

Nothing but the news

OGJ is first and foremost a news organization serving operating oil and gas companies. From inception in 1902, that's been its mission. And for many years, even decades, weekly news was sufficient. Then came CNN and the internet.

So, in 2000, OGJ unveiled its upgraded and expanded web site and moved much of its news service there. At the same time, the weekly magazine was reformatted.

OGJ Editor Bob Tippee more than adequately explained these changes then (OGJ, May 1, 2000, p. 23). The present point is that since then readers have learned to come to OGJ's web site (www.ogjonline.com) for daily updates of important industry news.

But, the question persists: "Where do you get the material you publish?"

No mystery there: The industry gives it to us.

Just because business conditions may fluctuate and even, as now, dive, the volume of news and information that business generates doesn't; if anything, it grows.

Companies still explore, drill, produce, move, and refine petroleum and natural gas. And for various reasons, they still like to talk about those activities. OK, OK. Maybe they don't always like to talk about them. But the information still comes out, sometimes only after prodding by persistent editors.

And those are OGJ's subjects, the operations of the worldwide petroleum industry.

Complementing this running account of operations is a weekly group of longer, usually more technical articles in industry-specific sections behind the Newsletter and the General Interest section: exploration and development, drilling and production, processing, and transportation.

This is what we refer to as the "back of the book." This week's Worldwide Pipeline Construction report (p. 62) in Transportation is an example.

Editors for those sections are, for the most part, responsible for addressing segment-specific topics in great, often highly technical detail.

It's still news—news of technologies, of practices, of project design and execution. But for those sections' editors, that insistent question about source draws a slightly different answer. Most of the articles in the industry-specific sections are contributed by outside authors.

Almost every day, a section editor's e-mail "Inbox" receives a message with an article attached, the sender asking to have it published in OGJ. The submission may be a full-blown, weighty technical paper or it may be a single-page press release about a new product or process.

In addition, Journal section editors keep their eyes out for the best presentations at industry technical and professional conferences. They also seek industry experts to address important issues in detail.

Selecting material, however, varies little from what goes on for the news editors: Decisions about publication still center on an editor determining what is most useful and of interest to OGJ's core readers, the managers and petroleum scientists in the operating companies. How can what OGJ publishes help them better perform their jobs?

Above the criteria for making such judgments rises one: Does a paper or release present (or promise) actual, recent, relevant test or field data to support its more general assertions?

Many an article explains the details and advantages of a technology but fails to provide specific, supporting data. Often, the technology has no field-use history, the paper being part of a campaign to sell the technology to the operating industry.

Such papers do not get into the "back of the book."

Readers rule

This structure, in which the magazine's sections complement and amplify each other, is what I like to call the "genius of the Journal": a weekly news magazine and a technical journal in one cover.

The focus explains its success: readers who, quite correctly, expect OGJ's pages to be free of commercial motive.

In a medium whose profitability hangs on advertising revenues, even the appearance of collusion between editorial and advertising pages can undermine credibility—and thereby harm the effect of both.

OGJ's editors jealously and zealously guard their responsibilities to their readers. It's a "news" magazine. Enough said.