Journally Speaking: Love letters

Oil & Gas Journal no longer runs a ‘Letters to the Editor’ column, but that doesn’t mean we’re not reading your e-mails, social media posts, and direct messages. In fact, your feedback and eagerness to share it with us are hallmarks of OGJ’s readership since the magazine’s inception.

Not every reader gets a personal response these days given our relatively compact staffing levels. But please don’t take a delayed reply or lack of one at as neglect, because we see it all.

A somewhat open secret of journalism is that we editors thrive on you noticing us, regardless of the context. Whether as good or bad, insightful or dull, cutting-edge renegades or cantankerous codgers; it hardly matters to us. What ultimately registers is that you love us enough to want to reach out to us. And we love you for telling us what you think and how you feel about what we do.

Heck, let’s go ahead and come really clean here. We even love those few of you who sometimes feel compelled to tell us that you basically hate us because we aren’t the same magazine we were back in the “good old days.”

Sweet nothings

We love that you openly pine for a return to a time when our pages included, say, Halloween-season advertisements featuring cartoon depictions of scantily clad witches soaring wildly and nearly topless through the air. Or a time when good ol’ boys could just act however they wanted. Or better still, a time when what was lawful, responsible, or ethical petroleum development was defined as what one could get away with.

As enticing as these general musings are, however, the most alluring statements are more narrowly focused. Alongside playful pet names (which include such personal favorites directed solely at this editor as “paid Mexican agent,” “backboneless,” “climate-sympathizing nut,” “unquestionabl[e] critical race theory advocate,” and “lamb blindly headed to the slaughter” for simply reporting verifiable, confirmable facts on Latin-South American refineries, global renewable diesel projects, African refineries, and Russian refineries, respectively) comes the advice that OGJ abandon all standards of journalistic factual objectivity to inject xenophobia-based skepticism and doubt in industry news items that otherwise accurately report on events in the non-US world.

Better left unsaid

Despite all of this, we do still hear and appreciate you. As legitimate journalists, we love to understand both sides. As such, the stories we tell are not our own. They are those told to us by the industry, and like it or not, the industry and its ways are changing.

Change is hard but inevitable. The flame of devotion can only be sustained for as long as those tending it evolve to fit the reality around them. OGJ’s expansion of its coverage reflects the evolution of the industry with which it’s shared a more-than century’s long affair. We’ve grown together in shared understanding—as Heraclitus said millennia ago—that all is flux and nothing stays static. We report confirmable truths. We do not politicize or recast facts to favor one side above another because facts are facts. Truth, in this sense, has no versions.

We invite you to join us in this understanding and embrace the promise of the future. We hope to share that conversation with you.

But if you wish to send letters still deep in the Acheron of your losses, at least keep them professional.