Until Apr. 3, 2018, the Oil & Gas Journal had not had a new owner since Apr. 20, 1910. Now it has had two of them.
The new owner is itself new. Endeavor Business Media, Nashville, began life late in 2017 “to acquire and operate trade publications, web sites, and events.”
OGJ was in a bundle of such properties Endeavor purchased in February from Clarion Events, which bought PennWell Corp., OGJ’s former owner, a year ago April.
Sound chaotic?
It’s not. In fact, the rapid change has a certain feel of destiny to this OGJ veteran.
A long run
OGJ began life in Beaumont, Tex., on May 24, 1902, as Oil Investors Journal. Spindletop oil field was booming, and so were news distortions and financial chicanery.
A St. Louis newspaperman named Holland Reavis started the magazine to publish, as he promised, “The truth and nothing but the truth concerning the Beaumont field and other southwestern oil fields.”
Reavis sold his creation in 1910 to Patrick C. Boyle, a newspaper publisher in Oil City, Pa., who promptly gave his acquisition the name it bears today.
With that acquisition and a marriage, OGJ came to be owned by the family in whose hands it would remain until Clarion bought PennWell last year.
One hundred eight years is a long run for a private, family-owned business.
And during that time a media conglomerate developed around and beyond OGJ and magazine publishing.
The company Boyle named Petroleum Publishing Co. became PennWell Publishing Co. in 1980 to show its focus had expanded beyond oil and gas but to retain an echo of heritage. Later, the word “publishing” vanished to reflect a broadening business scope.
OGJ changed, too. It moved aggressively into online publishing in the 1990s and was among the first magazines in any industry to publish real-time, online news.
That forward-looking move occurred in OGJ’s centennial year, when the tendency might have been strong to look dangerously backward.
OGJ still innovates. It has electronic newsletters and a newsy Twitter feed with nearly 200,000 followers. Last year, it launched Oil & Gas Community, an online collaboration platform with blogs, forum discussions, and other interactive features in seven topical channels. (Plug: Sign up at no cost at www.ogj.com/oilandgascommunity.)
Other services capitalizing on multimedia innovation will appear soon.
Something important that didn’t change while the Lauinger family owned OGJ was the commitment to editorial independence and integrity on which a St. Louis newspaperman founded his journal in East Texas.
PennWell’s business priorities evolved, of course. From diversification of publication topics came diversification into companion businesses, especially conferences and exhibitions.
PennWell committed itself with great success to those enterprises, which top executives called simply “shows.”
Indeed, as ownership became cumbersome for a growing and geographically diverse family, many large PennWell shows became appealing to an international events specialist owned by funds of the investment firm Blackstone.
Hence, OGJ’s first new owner in 108 years.
With PennWell, however, Clarion acquired more publications than it needed. So it packaged its new magazines, many keeping their own events, into an entity called PennWell Media, which is what Endeavor acquired in February, roughly doubling its size.
Needless to say, the past few months have featured exercises in adaptation—to new accounting systems, new travel policies, new human resources procedures.
Endeavor folks in place before the PennWell acquisition have been especially busy.
Craving the new
For OGJ readers, the visible changes are a new publisher’s logo, new corporate officers in the masthead, and, soon, a new web site. For OGJ editors, that last item means an imminent transfer to Endeavor online platforms. Service problems are possible.
Whatever temporary dislocations might be in store, an old magazine ever craving the new now has a new owner, new itself, with a stated mission “to deliver the highest-quality content in the B2B markets we serve and to do so in the various, multichannel formats that today’s readers demand.”
Holland Reavis would approve.
