A new member of the PennWell Petroleum Group family will come to you soon.
It’s Unconventional Oil & Gas Report, a bimonthly news publication with a local focus across many areas.
That description might sound contradictory.
Bimonthly news? Publishing every other month, at least at first, UOGR can’t be the timeliest publication around.
But news has to do with more than timeliness. It also has to do with exclusivity, depth, and focus. UOGR can report stories others ignore. It can be comprehensive. And it can target coverage to professional readers in areas important to the subject.
In fact, the new publication capitalizes on those strengths. Read the first issue. You’ll see.
And how can a publication focus locally across many areas?
The short answer is that it can report local stories in multiple localities on subjects of interest everywhere.
This approach makes UOGR unique. And it requires some elaboration about the editorial mission.
Play by play
The localities in UOGR’s coverage are unconventional oil and gas plays, variously defined. The first issue of UOGR has stories on the Eagle Ford shale of South Texas and eastern Mexico, the Marcellus shale of the US Northeast, the Mississippi Lime of the Midcontinent region, the Bakken play of North Dakota, and others, grouped accordingly.
Reporting locally, play by play, UOGR can burrow deeply into a story. It can report details that oil and gas professionals working where events in the story occur need to know. Readers in other areas might not need those details quite so intensely, but they’ll probably find them more than slightly interesting. Experience seemingly unique to one place often proves richly instructive elsewhere.
A play-by-play focus is one way UOGR differs from and complements news coverage in Oil & Gas Journal, its parent. OGJ’s news, even when about specific areas, as much of it is, addresses an international audience. OGJ news always assumes global readership and therefore favors brevity, clarity, and careful selection of stories and details within them.
For a typical OGJ news story—as opposed to a feature or technical article—writers and editors select and report details essential to any operational decision-maker anywhere in the world—and quickly move on to the next story. For UOGR stories, all of which are news or features, editors select and report details essential to anyone in the oil and gas business in the story’s area and spend more time and space than are available in OGJ in the telling.
While OGJ is part news magazine and part technical journal, UOGR is all news magazine. Because news in unconventional oil and gas plays is driven by technology, however, UOGR doesn’t hesitate to cover it—along with the politics, people, and other shapers of the impressive energy supply emerging from unconventional resources.
In this new publication the phrase "unconventional oil and gas" means resources developed from reservoirs requiring unconventionally high inputs of technology and energy because of rock characteristics rather than oil viscosity. UOGR thus leaves coverage of heavy oil and oil sands to OGJ.
And because most development of unconventional oil and gas reservoirs by this definition occurs so far in North America, that’s UOGR’s geographic scope for now. The continent provides plenty to cover.
Tayvis Dunnahoe, UOGR editor, learned that while planning and writing the first issue. The more he interviewed subjects and developed articles, he says, the more he discovered remained to be covered. He’s already working on the second issue.
Dunnahoe is a 2007 graduate in technical writing and professional communications of the University of Houston. Before joining OGJ and UOGR, he worked on the staffs of service-company publications and other oil-industry trade magazines. He also has been a writing tutor at University of Houston and Emerson College in Boston.
Same commitment
Start-up of UOGR in no way changes the news and technical coverage of unconventional oil and gas plays by OGJ. UOGR’s coverage is supplemental and complementary to OGJ’s and somewhat different, as described, in approach.
What won’t be different from OGJ is UOGR’s pursuit of integrity, authority, and service to the industry it covers. UOGR grows out of a 111-year-old commitment to those values and thus takes its place in a rich legacy.
