Deadlines in a weekly publishing environment make the heart beat and the blood flow. They invigorate. They intimidate.
They’re not like deadlines in some environments, the kind that smear over several days or weeks, the kind where it can be assumed that whoever set the time built in a safety margin.
At a weekly magazine like Oil & Gas Journal, safety margins are scarce and thin. Everything has to happen before the press rolls, and the press always rolls on time.
Technically, magazines that miss their press times can, at some not inconsiderable cost, be rescheduled. Monthly magazines sometimes do this. Weeklies, however, don’t have the luxury. Because presses stay busy, they seldom have time in a single week to reschedule a large job like a magazine.
Embarrassing voids
At a weekly magazine, therefore, missing press time means missing a week, an intolerable turn of events. So the press rolls when it rolls, and failure to meet one of the many preceding deadlines can result in embarrassing white voids where text, photos, or figures should have appeared. Voids like that are not good for editorial careers. Stern discipline about rigid deadlines keeps them from happening.
By practical necessity, copy deadlines for any particular issue of OGJ cascade backward from the publication date by anywhere from 5 days to 4 weeks, depending on where in the magazine the copy will appear. The scheduling gets complicated. The execution makes occasional use of the terrifying reminder that something you have forgotten to start needs to be finished in an hour.
Yet the system mostly depends on adherence to and enforcement of deadlines of the drop-dead variety. Some people call this pressure. Editors, in their better moments, see it as creative stimulation.
OGJ editors traditionally have had several deadlines each per week. Now the news team-Steven Poruban, Judy Clark, Sam Fletcher, Paula Dittrick, and Angel White-has a daily deadline, too.
In September, OGJ launched two electronic newsletters, one a weekly and the other a daily, weekends excepted. Both distribute by e-mail links to articles posted on the magazine’s web site, OGJ Online (www.ogjonline.com).
The centerpiece of OGJ Daily Update is the Market Watch feature, written most days by Fletcher. Appearing until now only on OGJ Online, Market Watch reports the prior trading day’s movements in oil and gas prices, the major news events affecting them, and analysts’ comments. Along with Market Watch, OGJ Daily Update distributes as many as nine other news stories, sometimes more.
These aren’t cut-and-pasted press releases or automatic feeds from mass-media newswires. They’re stories, even the short ones, that OGJ editors and correspondents either report themselves or, for items that do start with press releases, enhance with research to provide the operational details and background demanded by a professional audience.
The new weekly, OGJ Weekly E&D Report, includes stories written and edited the same way but in one category. Every Thursday, it e-mails links to all items appearing the preceding week in OGJ Online’s Exploration & Development section, including the Area Drilling subsection. That’s typically about 20 items, a rich menu of upstream news.
Theoretically, the start-up of two electronic newsletters populated with material from the web site shouldn’t have altered editorial procedures much. All along, the OGJ news team has been continuously writing, editing, and posting news stories on OGJ Online and reformatting items destined for print. Theoretically, the newsletters should have required only a few minutes for someone to throw out the electronic lasso and herd targeted stories into the newsletter template.
But of course the news business isn’t motivated by theory. It’s motivated by the time value of information. A news team yearns to deliver the best material as quickly as possible.
Late lunches
For the OGJ news team, therefore, each day now provides a new adrenaline surge, a compulsion to finish today the story that might once have waited until tomorrow, a motivation to add one more item to that day’s already solid line-up, and-sometimes-a few minutes of outright panic. Each day now has a new deadline: 1 p.m. Texas time. Late lunches have become routine.
The newsletters are available at no charge. To subscribe, click “e-newsletters” next to the word “SUBSCRIBE” at the left of the blue bar near the top of the OGJ Online home page.
We’d like to hear what you think, preferably after 1 p.m. Texas time.✦