The October, 2017, cover of Oilweek is likely its last after the magazine’s owner announced the print edition will ceased to be published.
At its monthly peak, Oilweek magazine was 130 pages of insight and influence. Its editors and writers covered the gamut, from Alberta's glorious highs – oil being sold for $147.27 (U.S.) a barrel in July, 2008 – to its crippling lows – oil for less than $30 a barrel in February, 2016.
But, earlier this week, it was revealed that the magazine with more than 60 years of history had no future in its printed form. Faced with a downtrodden Alberta economy, with the price of oil struggling to stay above $50 (in West Texas Intermediate prices), and with print journalism desperate in its quest for advertising revenue and committed subscribers, Oilweek became a symbolic casualty – and ceased to publish.
"All the cards were stacked against Oilweek," said former columnist David Yager, "the cost of advertising, the lack of cash, all that's happening in the industry – what are you really selling? Six-hundred-and-thirty rigs and only 200 of them drilling? …They don't need to advertise that any more."
Oilweek, according to its parent company, Calgary-based JWN Energy, will maintain a digital presence where its annual features – rising stars, producer and supplier of the year, top-100 oil and gas companies – will carry on and be dispatched via new media. That said, Oilweek isn't the only oil and gas publication to stop printing this year.
JWN's Alberta Construction Magazine shut down in March citing advertising and sales challenges. Venture Publishing, with its premier magazines Alberta Venture and Alberta Oil, was closed in August after its founder Ruth Kelly died suddenly in June. She had purchased Venture magazine from the provincial government for $100 in 1997 and transformed it, and Alberta Oil, into an industry dynamo. In its final months, however, Venture was inundated with financial hardships and owed freelance writers and photographers $40,000 for unpaid assignments.
"[Oilweek] was actually still performing quite well for us," said Bemal Mehta, JWN vice-president of energy intelligence. "Where the shift happened [in how best to position Oilweek] was the pace of information. There's a new development in the oil and gas industry almost every day. The real shift here has been the industry wanting more information and faster. That's better deployed through digital news."
JWN also owns the Daily Oil Bulletin, which is about to celebrate its 80th anniversary. DOB was originally a trade sheet but has earned its online niche by responding to its consumers.
"What we found in the last 2 1/2 years is we've gone from one [industry news] e-mail to our readers a day to the point now where we have a morning briefing, one at noon and we have a market-closed briefing that goes out at about 4 p.m.," Mr. Mehta said. "This came from client demand."
Oilweek's story essentially began with the ink-stained partnership of Les Rowland and Carl Nickle. Mr. Rowland, who would write about the business for more than 40 years, and Mr. Nickle, who started off as a radio reporter in Calgary, co-founded Oil in Canada in 1948, not long after the Leduc No. 1 well spewed black gold and signalled the start of the modern-day oil boom in Western Canada. In 1963, Oil in Canada merged with Oilweek and grew into a position of prominence with a readership in excess of 50,000. By the early 1990s, Oilweek opted to become a monthly.
Dale Lunan was editor of Oilweek until 2016. He recalled the publication's "salad days" as being "not that long ago, pre-2014 when oil was over $100.
"Everyone was flying high. Oilweek was running 130 pages every month," said Mr. Lunan. "There was a lot going on and a lot to write about. There is still lots to write about, but when the Internet came along, and when [oil] prices cratered, the advertising budgets disappeared. You just can't sell advertising, and for a magazine like Oilweek, that's its life blood. It doesn't exist on subscriptions.
"They say they're going to have a digital presence," Mr. Lunan added, "but we'd been trying to create a digital presence of some sort when I was there and it just never seemed to take. I guess the costs are going to be a whole lot lower. It was that print bill that was really killing them."
Those who once worked at Oilweek say what they'll miss is what gave the magazine its clout – the in-depth examinations of "the story behind the story" in a glossy format.
"When horizontal drilling came out in the 1980s it was the magazine that explained how it worked – not just why they did it, but how they did it," Mr. Yager, the former columnist, said. "Unlike a broadsheet paper where you get 600 words, a feature article in Oilweek would go for three, four pages. That's the part that bothers me the most: Is there still going to be a job for trained and capable journalists who can spin a yarn? Hopefully, that tradition will continue in the digital world."