2008 marks 90th year for The Lamp publication

Today, The Lamp has a readership of more than 650,000 who look to the magazine for information about ExxonMobil and the energy industry.

In 1918, the strains of growth and rapid change were being felt throughout Standard Oil Company (New Jersey).

The company’s assets had nearly doubled to $700 million in six years, mainly due to an increased focus on building its oil-supply base in the United States and overseas. With the naming of Walter Teagle as president in 1917, the company’s expansion had accelerated.

Meanwhile, as the “war to end all wars” raged on, Jersey Standard continued to run its production, refining and transportation operations at full throttle. The effort eventually would provide one-fourth of the total petroleum requirements of the United States and its allies in World War I.

Despite the heightened activity, Jersey Standard managed to achieve dramatic change on yet another front. The company and refinery employees in early 1918 negotiated one of the most progressive benefits/labor-relations packages of that time. It included proposals recommended by industrial relations pioneer Clarence Hicks, who along with Teagle supported an eight-hour workday.

Lighting The Lamp

With change “busting out all over” at Jersey, the company recognized it needed a formal avenue for keeping employees informed. While president of Jersey’s Imperial Oil Limited affiliate in Canada, Teagle had launched the Imperial Oil Review in 1915. He valued how the magazine with its company news and information had helped build employee morale. After becoming president of Jersey, Teagle invited Imperial Oil Review Editor Victor Ross, a former Toronto Globe financial writer, to come to the company’s 26 Broadway headquarters in New York to help him “light The Lamp.”

The editorship was soon turned over to Northrop Clarey, former financial editor of The New York Times. However, Teagle served as The Lamp’s ex officio editor-in-chief, generating article ideas, offering copy edits and dictating editorial topics.

Volume 1, Number 1 of The Lamp, published in May 1918, outlined Teagle’s original objective for the magazine, that it cultivate “a spirit of fellowship and cordial cooperation” among employees. But he also envisioned a much wider purpose, that its “rays will reach everyone interested directly or indirectly in the fortunes of the company,” allowing “no shadows of misconception nor suspicion to endure,” and that “it will prove to be a lighthouse in the uncharted seas of the future.”

The public takes notice

That wider purpose soon began to bear fruit. Investors, shareholders, government officials, teachers, librarians, newspaper editors and other nonemployees increasingly looked to the magazine as a reliable source of information about the company and the international petroleum industry.

While the magazine continued to cover benefits issues and local news of direct interest to employees, stories titled “Why Gasoline Now Costs More” and “Increasing Crude Supply” (topics that lately have recaptured the public’s attention) had wide appeal, particularly in light of the world’s growing love affair with the automobile. Others such as “Adventures in the Upper Amazon” and “Hunting for Oil in Arabia” stoked the U.S. public’s fascination about life in exotic, faraway lands. In fact, requests for copies reached such a point in the early 1920s that the company began accepting subscriptions for $1 a year.

Another reason the magazine proved so popular was that it essentially served as Jersey’s only external communications channel. Teagle believed that almost anything worth knowing about the company could be found in The Lamp’s feature articles and management editorials.

By the early 1940s, however, it had become clear that the company’s growth required a more comprehensive public communications program. Jersey responded by organizing a public relations department in 1943. And with a growing number of local departmental and affiliate publications covering employee news, Jersey also officially redirected The Lamp exclusively to external audiences, especially shareholders. In addition, it stepped up efforts to add more opinion leaders in government, business and academia to the circulation list.

From one century to the next

During the seven decades that have followed, as Jersey Standard became Exxon and as Exxon became part of the new ExxonMobil, The Lamp has tracked the company’s progress for hundreds of thousands of readers and provided a window on the world around the company’s operations.

From one generation to the next, The Lamp has put a face on one of the world’s largest enterprises. It has done so by telling the stories of employees whose talents and imagination have continued to improve the quality of life for people around the world and whose commitment to corporate citizenship has consistently remained a top priority.

From one century to the next, The Lamp has served as an important stage for the company to speak out on issues affecting public and governmental policy, many that have often dealt with energy supply and demand. Today, 90 years since the magazine’s founding, that stage is as critical as it has ever been.

“The world again finds itself in significant transition regarding the use and availability of energy,” says Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil Public Affairs vice president. “And, just as the company has faced these challenges in the past, our people recognize and understand today’s critical energy issues and are working hard to find solutions. In honoring Walter Teagle’s admonition of 90 years ago, The Lamp remains an important outlet to communicate these efforts to our shareholders and employees as well as to opinion leaders and other stakeholders.”