Oil & Gas Journal institutionally leans toward the future without disengaging from a rich past and does so again in this issue.
Guided first and always by service to readers, OGJ embraces new media, new formats, and new modes of delivery but never violates its founding principle of "adhering to a strict policy of honesty and accuracy."
Those words appeared 113 years ago this month in the first issue of OGJ precursor Oil Investors' Journal. They apply as steadfastly now as then.
Growing, moving, evolving
Steadied by this commitment, the magazine has grown, moved, and evolved with the industry it covers.
Oil Investors' Journal became The Oil and Gas Journal after its purchase in 1910 by members of the family that owns it even now and that built a company, PennWell Corp., around it.
The magazine soon became weekly in frequency and followed centers of industry work from Beaumont, Tex., to Tulsa, and ultimately to Houston.
After the move to Houston in 1990, OGJ editors saw opportunity in an emergent medium called the internet. Leaning, as always, toward the future, OGJ became a pioneer of online publishing, enhancing its selective, authoritative approach to industry news with timeliness available on the worldwide web.
OGJ Online remains a vibrant, comprehensive source of industry intelligence. It's the launch point of daily, weekly, and monthly electronic newsletters and of a social media network with more than 100,000 Twitter followers.
Creative use of digital media led naturally to what might have been a radical reconfiguration of the magazine in 2010 but really wasn't. Dedicated to weekly frequency, OGJ began publishing in print during the first week of each month and in an interactive digital format in subsequent weeks. It bunched technical articles, still most at home in print, into the first-week issue. That issue and all others of the month contain nontechnical news, editorials, columns, and statistics.
The reconfiguration leaves OGJ unmatched among industry magazines in timeliness, volume, and subject range.
OGJ also has produced offspring. Recent examples are Unconventional Oil & Gas Report, launched in mid-2013, and Oil & Gas Financial Journal, begun in March 2004.
Fifty years before OGFJ's debut, OGJ made a similar move when an audience had consolidated around industry equipment and services. Oil and Gas Equipment's first issue appeared in November 1954.
OGJ then became able to concentrate its news, technical, and statistical coverage on upstream, midstream, and downstream operations, leaving equipment and services to its monthly progeny, renamed Oil, Gas & Petrochem Equipment in 1969.
Founding Editor Earl A. Seaton, later an OGJ technical editor, wrote in the first issue that the tabloid's mission was "to keep you informed on equipment and to help you understand the mechanical principles which make equipment work for you."
J.B. Avants, who joined OG&PE in 1972, replaced Seaton as editor in 1978, and became publisher as well in 1996, remains committed to that ideal.
Now, guided by their founding principles, OGJ and OG&PE lean toward the future together. OG&PE herewith becomes an annex of OGJ, distributed with the parent but brightly distinct from it. OG&PE retains its identity, format with size adjustments, own page numbering, editorial control and mission, online services, and sales staff.
Why the reunion?
So why implement this reunion by distribution?
For 60 years, OGJ and OG&PE have sharpened their editorial focuses and become better at their specialties than OGJ could have become trying to cover operations and equipment together. Even in the 1950s, the industry was complex.
Yet audience interest overlaps. Most industry professionals need to know about operations as well as equipment and services.
Delivering OGJ and OG&PE together retains the authoritative focus of each publication while offering readers a multifaceted treasure of professional-grade intelligence in a single package.
It's a package brimming with synergy. The possibilities aren't fully predictable.
That's what makes leaning toward the future so much more rewarding than loitering in glories of the past or comforts of the present.
