Pipeline industry CEO uses his own newspaper to pen pro-pipeline editorial

Doug Reynolds took to his own newspapers to criticize opponents of pipeline construction.

Atlantic Coast Pipeline being built prior to cancellation outside Dry Branch, W.Va., Jun. 26, 2020. (Photo/PIPELINE CSI)

Jul. 19, 2020 • Written by Kyle Vass; Edited by Lacey Johnson and Michael Falero

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (Dragline)—Doug Reynolds, the son of multi-millionaire entrepreneur Marshall Reynolds, has worn a lot of hats over the last 20 years: CEO of a construction company, member of the West Virginia House of Delegates and founder of HD Media, a company that owns five newspapers in the southwest of his home state.

Reynolds formed HD Media in 2013 with the purpose of buying a newspaper from his father’s company, Champion Industries. Reynolds expanded, buying up four more papers in the area and issuing multiple layoffs. The casualties included veteran editor Rob Byers, who led the Charleston Gazette’s newsroom to a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. But it wasn’t until 2020 that Reynolds stepped forward to take on a new role in the newspaper industry: op-ed columnist for his own papers. 

Between July 7 and July 12, Reynolds and HD Media published a series of op-eds across three of his publications, all touting the benefits of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The controversial pipeline was slated to carry shale gas 600 miles from West Virginia, through Virginia, to eastern North Carolina. However, on July 5, the developers announced that they were no longer moving forward “given the legal uncertainties facing the project.”

In a July 11 op-ed titled, “No one wins in scrapped pipeline project,” Reynolds took issue with what he sees as a common misconception among environmentalists—the idea that “if oil and natural gas utilities lose, the environment wins.”  

“It’s damn easy to figure out what has been lost,” he wrote, “but for the life of me I can’t ascertain who won.” What Reynolds failed to mention is what exactly is losing: his natural gas pipeline construction company.

Doug Reynolds is the managing owner of HD Media and president of Energy Solutions of America in Huntington, W.Va., Oct. 18, 2018. (Photo/Herald Dispatch)

Blurred Lines

According to the US Energy Information Administration, natural gas prices in the US fell to a two decade-low in March. Reynolds currently serves as the president of Energy Services of America, an acquisition company that owns two natural gas pipeline construction firms. He revealed to investors in May, “The first half of fiscal year 2020 has been the most eventful and challenging time that we have faced in my tenure at Energy Services...The loss of $1.9 million for the six months ended March 31, 2020 was much worse than contained in our business plan….We began making layoffs in early March as projects were first delayed for weeks and then months. Our business is completely unsustainable with only $18.1 million of revenue that we achieved in the three months ended March 31, 2020.”

In his op-ed article, Reynolds did not state his role at Energy Services of America. He lamented for every community in West Virginia that has “its own tale of missed opportunities, including promised highways, plants, regional airports and retail centers that never came into being,” while making no mention of his own financial ties in the natural gas industry. 

He is also the managing owner of HD Media, the company who owns the newspapers that ran his op-ed piece. Since the HD Media acquisition of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, one of the newspapers to run his op-ed, layoffs and resignations have become commonplace. Most notably, MacArthur Fellow recipient Ken Ward Jr. quit when Lee Wolverton, an HD Media appointed regional executive editor, fired Ward’s longtime friend and editor Greg Moore. 

Responding to a media inquiry, Reynolds denied that his financial interests affect the content of his papers. He says “Ken Ward’s ProPublica articles he wrote for a year is evidence” against such a claim—a reference to articles Ward published while working for HD Media that were critical of the pipeline industry. Reynolds added, “My observation is that the editors and reporters have enough backbone to not let my lifetime Democrat affiliation or personal foibles affect their hard work.” Reynolds also stated that his position as managing owner at HD Media had nothing to do with the company’s decision to run his op-ed article. He quoted Wolverton, who would've approved the publication of Reynolds op-ed, as saying,“being from Huntington, if you would like to run an op-ed saying Doug Reynolds is full of shit; eloquently, we would likely run it.”

From sustained outrage to sustainable profits

Pacific Standard ran an article on Reynolds and HD Media’s purchase of the Charleston Gazette-Mail on Jul., 23, 2019. (Illustration/Imogen Todd via GRIST)

Four months after HD Media’s acquisition of the Gazette-Mail, Brent Cunningham wrote an article entitled, “Losing the News,” about Reynolds and his acquisition of the state’s only investigative newspaper. Cunningham wrote that when he asked Reynolds about taking over the Gazette-Mail and immediately firing 11 people, Reynolds responded, “We had to get sustainable with the revenue we got,” adding, “Newspapers are first and foremost a business.”

In an interview with Dragline, Cunningham said looking back one year after writing his article, he wrote it with a touch of optimism that now feels misplaced. “Doug’s not the worst, he’s just part of what’s happening to journalism in this country—a death by a thousand cuts. To him it’s a business and needs to turn a profit. If that means you lose a Ken Ward in the process, so be it.” To Cunningham, it’s heartbreaking to have watched the Gazette-Mail go from the days of Ned Chilton to the days of Doug Reynolds.

Ned Chilton, according to Cunningham, was a man who “wielded the Gazette's editorial page like a cudgel against anyone and anything that ran afoul of his uncompromising sense of right and wrong.” Chilton inherited the Gazette in 1961 and is credited with setting the tone of their award-winning, “take no prisoners” newsroom. He famously gave a speech to a group of newspaper publishers saying, “The hallmark of crusading journalism is sustained outrage.” Under Doug Reynolds, the Gazette-Mail’s focus shifted from “sustainable outrage” to “sustainable profits.”

Cunningham said Doug Reynolds emailed him after reading his now prophetic article last year. “I think the only thing the email said was, ‘I appreciate your commitment to great journalism.’ I think Doug Reynolds had an opportunity to show he cared about great journalism. I wish he had a commitment to great journalism.”