Energy policy
OilWatchdog.org
Energy industry investigation and accountability reporting — a publishing platform built to survive a decade of filings.
OilWatchdog is the energy arm of Consumer Watchdog's investigative work: refinery margins, gasoline price spikes, state energy commission filings, and the gap between what oil companies tell regulators and what they tell shareholders.
The shape of the content
This is not a blog with an energy tag. It is an investigative archive where a story published in 2014 still needs to be findable, citable and correctly linked to the filing it was about. Every piece of reporting attaches to a company, a regulatory proceeding and a policy area, and any of those three is a legitimate way in.
That taxonomy is the whole build. Get it wrong and you have a pile of posts; get it right and a reporter searching for one refinery finds eight years of context in one click.
What it has to do on a bad day
Gasoline prices spike, and traffic goes from steady to enormous inside an hour, driven by television coverage and search. The site has to hold that without a caching layer somebody has to remember to warm, and the newest analysis has to be at the top of the relevant landing pages without an editor doing manual placement in the middle of a news cycle.
The unglamorous part
Most of the ongoing work is link integrity. Regulatory bodies reorganise their document servers, PDFs move, agencies retire subdomains. An investigative archive whose citations have quietly rotted is worth much less than it looks, so checking that the evidence still resolves is a permanent chore rather than a launch task.