The yellow magazine

June 9, 2014
Back when I started working for Oil & Gas Journal, there was an office manager at the Houston bureau who I very much admired.

Back when I started working for Oil & Gas Journal, there was an office manager at the Houston bureau who I very much admired. Not only did she have the diplomatic skills needed to effectively deal with the day-to-day personnel drama, but she also possessed something else: an infectious dedication to OGJ.

She demonstrated this devotion in countless ways, one of which was how highly she spoke of the many OGJ publishers, editors, and salespeople—past and present alike. She'd say, "You know so-and-so? Some say that if you cut him, he would bleed black and yellow."

She would use this graphic expression to describe the staunch level of commitment someone had to OGJ. I always interpreted the adage to mean that the level of a person's fidelity to OGJ was so stout that their life-giving essence had effectively turned from red to the well-known hues of the magazine's spine.

Team-building

She was also full of stories—both humorous and poignant—that had been passed down through the years about various OGJ staffers.

She told me this funny story once—and I'm bound to get the specifics wrong, but the essence is still there—about a group of OGJ staffers that had assembled for some type of team-building exercise (or maybe it was a celebratory gathering?—again, the "what" of the story was more pertinent than the "why").

As I recall, as a part of the event, some OGJ staff members had performed a skit that they concluded by singing the melody of The Beatles' song "Yellow Submarine," only replacing the lyrics of the resounding chorus as such: "We all work for the yellow magazine, yellow magazine, yellow magazine…."

The vivid imagery of the scene as she described it has always stuck with me.

Living a dream

During a trip last week to OGJ's Tulsa headquarters, I was told another such tale of devotion. Among the trip's purposes was to get some face time with various OGJ groups at the home office and to talk about improvements to work flow between the two cities.

One of the teams I met with was the production group, which handles the awesome task of assembling the magazine—ads and editorial, print and digital—each and every week.

During a break, when I asked Senior Art Director Michelle Gourd how she came to work for OGJ, she relayed the following story:

She explained that her husband worked for Williams Bros. Engineering, which was then working on the Alaskan Pipeline. The company had an internal print shop that was a client of the printing company she worked for at the time.

One day, during an office visit, she saw an issue of OGJ on display on a coffee table. She recalls saying to herself, "I want to work for that magazine one day."

When she started with OGJ's parent company PennWell in 1995, her supervisor was Larry Spiker, OGJ's production director. She shared with Larry about her dream: to work on the Journal staff. That was back when OGJ was printed by PennWell Printing. She recalled Larry saying, "Michelle, if that is your dream, then I will show you how to make that happen."

She immersed herself in learning everything she could about the magazine. She's even been witness to the lead pressman actually yelling, "Stop the press!" when a mistake was spotted on one of the Journal pages by Senior Presentation Editor Jim Stilwell, now retired.

Today, she says, she is living her dream. "Every day I work on OGJ is a privilege," she told me.

Her mentors, Larry and Jim, had an unspoken standard of excellence, she said. "To me, working on OGJ is about personally being the most excellent student of excellence."

This editor couldn't agree more. After all, not everyone can count themselves fortunate enough to have worked for the yellow magazine.

For some, it must just be in their blood.