Journally Speaking: Kudos for collaboration

At the time of this writing, another round of OGJ’s annual worldwide refining survey is entering its homestretch. The process itself, however, strikes a particularly sharp cord with this editor because oft-touted professions of transparency and clarity by many invitees seem to fall to the wayside when it comes survey etiquette.

As a policy, we don’t call out invitees that make the survey undertaking more onerous than it need be, but this year’s process got this editor thinking about the larger matter of etiquette regarding media responsiveness in general by oil and gas operators.

Working under the more-than reasonable assumption that there actually are individuals within business organizations earning salaries for the role of responding to media inquiries, there couldn’t come a more apropos time than now to offer some insight as to how it works on the journalist’s side of things when e-mails and phone calls are disregarded by an operator’s media department.

It’s also a time to commend those companies that consistently—at least in the downstream sector—meet and exceed the responsiveness standard.

Stories untold

At OGJ, we tell industry stories in myriad formats, whether in copy, numbers, images, podcasts—you name it, we use it. Sure, these stories can be newsy because we’re about delivering details on industry happenings to meet the needs of our industry audience.

We’re human editors crafting stories for a human audience essentially about work humans are doing in this specific industry. Since we’re not writing fiction here, this means that the best stories are never solo endeavors: at their best, they require participation of both editor and subject. Boilerplate press releases are great to get the ball rolling, but boilerplate is boilerplate. The reasonable person would conclude that, at the bottom of these releases, where it invites an editor to contact this person at this phone number or e-mail address “for further information,” that someone will be at that end to pick up or reply.

Sadly, this would be a false conclusion. For discussion’s sake and with a generous rounding, let’s call the operator-response rate to these inquiries at about 40%.

When a company publishes a release filled with so many generalities and so few tangible details that it wouldn’t merit wasting the paper to print it out on, it makes it easy to decide to cover something else. This is especially true when there is no other official collateral on the news item available.

Any kind of response to these inquiries would be better than none.

Exceptional exceptions

With that unsavory business out of the way, the good news is that blatant disregard of media queries doesn’t extend across the board. We don’t call out the slackers, but there’s no rule about recognizing those consistently hitting the mark.

This editor’s 3-year running list of operator responsiveness shows three operators with a 100% responsiveness rate.

OGJ doesn’t hand out any kind of industry awards. But Marathon Petroleum Corp., bp PLC, and Phillips 66 Co., this editor would like to express his gratitude to you for unfailingly helping to tell your industry stories. If we had such an award to give, you’d each have one in hand.