A new information service illustrates three mainstays of Oil & Gas Journal’s approach to news.
It’s targeted. It’s electronic. And it’s authoritative.
The new service is OGJ Washington Pulse. You can find it by clicking the appropriately labeled link in the gray navigation bar on the left side of the OGJ Online home page (www.ogjonline.com).
On the OGJWP main page, you’ll find a number of articles in several departments plus an archive of stories written in previous weeks.
Articles go online as they’re written and edited. Each Thursday, all items written since the prior Thursday are assembled into a dated newsletter that can be downloaded from the “Archive” area and printed.
In a few weeks, only OGJWP subscribers will be able to open current articles and archived newsletters.
Key differences
As the name implies, OGJWP offers oil and gas news from the US capital. But it differs from its parent in the same way that OGJ differs from other news sources.
The difference is the target audience. OGJ addresses operational decision-makers in the oil and gas business—engineers, geoscientists, and top managers.
To OGJ’s audience, even outside the US, Washington news is important. Laws, regulations, and proposals in the world’s biggest energy-consuming country and fifth-largest oil producer affect the oil and gas business far beyond US boundaries.
So OGJ has covered Washington for decades. But it has aimed its Washington coverage at professionals busy with industry operations—people affected by but not directly involved with energy politics. The focus is on consequences rather than processes.
OGJWP reports the processes. It covers politics shaping legislative and regulatory proposals for readers with direct professional interests in all the personalities and maneuvering that are involved.
OGJWP thus covers political and procedural details that OGJ would omit for its busy, operationally oriented readers, just as OGJ in turn pursues and reports operational and technical details that a general-interest newspaper would leave out of coverage of the same story.
That difference, the targeting of coverage to a specialist audience, is the essence of news at OGJ.
Equally important to OGJ news is electronic delivery. Since 2002, OGJ has gone to its web site first with short, timely news items and followed up in the printed magazine. Doing so helps OGJ recapture the timeliness it sometimes sacrifices while editors pursue those operational details others omit and scrub from stories the fluff that fills so many web pages these days.
Also like the parent, OGJ’s Washington offspring writes and edits from a strong foundation of industry knowledge and experience. OGJWP’s editor is veteran Washington energy reporter Nick Snow.
OGJ readers know Snow’s work. He has been the magazine’s Washington correspondent and Watching Government columnist since September 2004. Until joining the staff full-time last October, he also worked part-time as a copy editor at the Washington Post.
During 1993-2002, Snow was editor of Petroleum Finance Week and for many years before that held editorial positions at the Oil Daily. He started in journalism at the Deseret News in Salt Lake City.
Snow holds a journalism degree from the University of Utah and in 1977 studied at Stanford University as an Energy Fellow, Professional Journalism Fellowships (now John S. Knight Fellowships).
Right combination
Snow knows how to write for savvy readers. He works fast in multimedia formats. And he knows the oil and gas business.
To anyone at OGJ or who knows OGJ, that’s the right combination. Let us know what you think of his work.
