With a new owner of Oil & Gas Journal, staff members received new email addresses containing publishing industry jargon perhaps puzzling to outsiders.
The new owner is Endeavor Business Media. And the alias is “endeavorb2b.”
What’s “b2b?”
Jargon has evolved
In publishing, it’s slang for “business-to-business.” And it relates more to advertising than to editorial work.
A b2b publication, such as Oil & Gas Journal, contains advertising in which businesses, such as oil field service or supply companies, sell to other businesses, such as oil and gas operators.
Although the formulation involves sales, the term applies as well to editors. And it, like most jargon, evolved.
Where once there were trade magazines and trade journalists there now are b2b publications and b2b editors—the term “journalist” seeming somehow to be receding from use.
The change enlivens the terminology and uplifts the activity. It seems that way, at any rate, to this veteran trade journalist now b2b editor.
In years past, trade journalism was scorned by practitioners of what now might be called b2c—business to consumer—journalists.
The practice was considered dull. Some purists even called it dishonest because it reported from the perspective of a specific industry rather than the vaunted neutrality of mass-media journalism.
Indeed, focused perspective is essential to trade—er, b2b journalism. That doesn’t make it inherently dishonest, though.
While still learning craft as a newspaper reporter, this editor covered a news conference in Dallas that changed his professional life.
The event was the 1977 annual meeting of the old Sun Co. soon after then-US President Jimmy Carter gave one of his speeches pessimistic about oil supply and suspicious of the oil industry.
At the crowded press conference after the meeting, reporters hurled gotcha questions at bemused Sun executives.
What struck this then-young reporter was how few of the inquiries sought enlightenment and how many seemed designed to evoke fevered response.
What a great quote reporters would have scored if one of the oil company suits had growled crudely about Carter!
In a later conversation about the uninformed interrogation, a television reporter remarked, “I don’t think it’s my job to ask smart questions. My job is to ask the questions my viewers would ask.”
That approach shines with egalitarianism. But it doesn’t scrape away much of the crust and grime that usually obscure the truth of a matter.
Anyway, the prospect of a career spent asking go-nowhere questions can make a person consider specializing.
And, sure enough, asking questions and writing from a basis of some knowledge for a more-learned audience turns out to have been an energizing challenge and endless education.
Call it what you will: trade or b2b journalism. Either way, it’s exhilarating.
And it’s especially so in an industry as large, diverse, risky, scientific, mechanical, controversial, and important as oil and gas. Even the market gyrations can be fun. Sort of.
B2b journalism is also, when done right, inherently honest. When you write for an audience of professionals who know more than you do about the subject, you can’t get away with anything.
The engineers, scientists, and managers who read Oil & Gas Journal know when they’re being promoted to rather than usefully informed. They know when writers become lazy or stilted. They know when essential questions go unasked. They know when their informational needs are being met and when they’re not.
Their expertise and demonstrated readiness to call out lapses keep OGJ editors alert and learning. And learning keeps exhilaration in the enterprise.
Students of industry
Gene Kinney, chief editor when this editor joined the staff 42 years ago, coached underlings to become “students of the industry.” And the industry, he would point out, is the audience.
That was good advice for trade journalists of the time. It’s good advice for b2b editors of the present.
It still will be good advice for whatever they’ll call people who do this in the future.
