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Robert Brelsford

Downstream Technology Editor

The role of an Oil & Gas Journal technical editor is multifaceted. Alongside procuring, editing, and bringing the latest and most relevant technology articles to publication, the technical editor also is responsible for covering daily news items for her or his specific sector of the industry.

This role as news writer rightfully complements the editor’s primary task of technical editing. When one keeps abreast of day-to-day happenings in one’s specialty, one naturally is better equipped to discern the topics of most interest for her or his technical audience.

There’s only one instance where the dual duty becomes burdensome, and it has nothing to do with issues of time, staffing, or scheduling. In fact, it has nothing to do with the editor at all. It does, however, have everything to do with when the information provided to the editor is flawed or incomplete. When facts provided via releases and announcements from public relations firms disagree with facts procured from the operators themselves, the business of newswriting can become an all-day drain on the brain of a very busy editor. So much of a drain, in fact, that even the most important news items sometimes fall to the cutting-room floor.

Apart at the seams

From this editor’s experience, the problem stems from what seems to be an unremitting lack of communication between project partners. While this category includes operators and service companies and suppliers, it also includes the most frequent and egregious offenders of the triad: PR firms.

Based on a purely business-economic perspective, if a company—be it direct operator, service supplier, or in many cases, both—was paying me to promote developments in its business activities, I’d like to think I’d be vigilant about ensuring my promotional materials were on point, on target, and above all, incontestably accurate. Certainly, as an OGJ editor—a third-party, impartial observer unpaid directly by members of the triad—this is always the goal. This commonsense approach, however, lately seems to be increasingly and drastically unraveling when it comes to PR firms.

Over the course of the last 3 months, a total of 11 official releases distributed via PR firms detailing downstream projects have crossed this editor’s desk that, in the end, remain there unused and uncovered, slowly collecting dust as multiple attempts to reach the PR firms responsible for their distribution remain unanswered.

Why not cover the stories anyway based on what’s been provided, you might ask? The answer is simple: OGJ is in the business of getting it right and getting it straight from the source. And it’s at this juncture where the operating-service companies’ rising use of PR firms truly becomes a dilemma. If you’re going to entrust your media relations to a third party, you need to make sure it’s one that’s responsive, reliable, and dedicated as much to your business as you are.

It’s fine to seek the comfort of having hired talking heads handle your communications with media to reduce perceived risks of having your own internal personnel directly field those communications. Everyone is doing it these days. But if these hired talking heads aren’t doing much talking to answer questions about the developments that you’ve hired them to talk about, we’ve all got a problem—especially when you cut off any lines of communication with your internal media group, which likely knows and can speak best about the facts of what you’re actively seeking to publicize.

Get it together

The bottom line is this: OGJ editors are busy. Given the ailing economic climate of our industry over the past several years and the toll it’s collectively taken on the oil and gas workforce, we’re even busier. We juggle an array of daily duties, and while newswriting is one of them, it’s only one. We make a concerted point to chase down facts, figures, and falsehoods to include or weed out of stories, all in an aim to deliver our readers authentically fake-free news.

Unlike the solitary novelist writing alone in the tower of fancy, the art of delivering news is a multipartner task. So to all of you operators and service companies-suppliers, if you’re going to continue to use PR firm proxies, choose wisely.

Communicate your message accurately, thoroughly, and precisely. Doublecheck their work. Provide answers to questions you anticipate credible news outlets will have. OGJ editors are all for chasing down truth but continue making the chase as hard and as time-consuming as it’s increasingly become, and the only place you’ll find your news in OGJ is here: on a desk, in a file folder, slowly collecting dust.