Every December, The Crude Life looks back at some of the year’s best highlights, personality profiles and news nuggets of note. This year, the Year In Review enters it’s 10th year. Here is today’s feature is
“I’m a method journalist so, before I do a story on skydiving, I’m going to go skydiving,” explains Jason Spiess, founder of The Crude Life podcast, and its public face and voice. “So, before I was going to do anything on oil and gas, I went to spend a little time in the Bakken Shale. I was out there for five minutes and I just fell in love with the opportunity the industry offered because I’m an entrepreneur at heart.”
Spiess originally set out to do an exposé on the oil and gas industry and, instead, had a change of heart. Armed with assignments from prestigious media outlets like the New York Times, he planned to use his investigative skills to report negatively on the industry, but says, “I saw very quickly that the oil and gas industry was not the enemy, not the bad guy, wasn’t the big bad wolf and that what it really did was create opportunities.”
However, what he also saw were “a lot of elected officials and appointed leaders abusing their power and a lot of middlemen that are making the oil and gas companies look bad. I didn’t see the oil and gas companies as the bad guys; I saw that there were some bad employees and some bad people.” While acknowledging that can be a problem in any industry, Spiess says the difference is, in the energy sector, with so much money at stake, it can have a real impact.
“What I saw was an industry that actually needed help with its image,” and in creating The Crude Life podcast, “we chose to look at the positives and the incredible innovation going on.” One of the ways Spiess and his crew do that is to focus on stories of “Everyman” – the ordinary men and women who make up the oil and gas industry. “I actually gained an authentic, organic respect for the industry because I was a method journalist,” he says of spending time living and working among the people, not just in oil and gas, but the other businesses they support, like the mom-and-pop store and the local hardware shop. “We wanted to be there to help tell the story from the 5,000-foot view, but also on the micro local level because that’s really where the change happens.”
Change has been a constant in Spiess’ own life. After 20 years as a journalist and publisher, he felt the full brunt of the 2009 economic downturn and was forced to close his business, a real blow to a lifelong entrepreneur, who had his first 1099 job at the age of 10 working a neighborhood newspaper route. At the time of the 2009 crisis, he was a stay-at-home dad with a young son and so, when he was offered a radio job, he says, “I took the steady paycheck.” It turned out to be a wise decision for a number of reasons and Spiess won two national awards in the three years he was with the station, covering natural disasters in his home state of North Dakota.
Starting The Crude Life podcast in 2012 was a natural progression of his career, as the communications industry moved online and became digitized, an evolution he sees as somewhat similar to the transition the oil and gas industry is currently experiencing.
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