Remembering Jane Van Ryan
Mark Green
Posted July 3, 2018
As many of our long-time readers know, I am not the original author of this blog but have carried on a conversation Jane Van Ryan started in 2009. Jane, who passed away on Sunday, was part of the original Energy Tomorrow team, whose goal was to help tell the story of the people of America’s natural gas and oil industry.
A former television reporter, Jane knew how to tell a story and tell it well. Here she is, regaling API colleagues Jocelyn Kelly and Marty Durbin with one of those stories a few years back.
On the ET Blog there was no shortage of topics to discuss – from the Keystone XL pipeline to hydraulic fracturing and the beginning of the shale revolution, taxes, gasoline prices and energy efficiency. And Jane occasionally leveraged her considerable on-camera talents to deliver key messages:
After hundreds of posts, conference calls with bloggers, videos, media tours to various natural gas and oil facilities and podcasts, Jane retired from API in 2011 after more than 20 years to live her dream of gardening and riding horses in rural Virginia.
She also kept her hand in communications work, providing services for the Rockingham County executive offices while contributing energy commentaries to newspapers around the U.S. Jane used many mediums to tell stories – TV journalist, blogger and book author, writing a 2007 biography of Evelyn Hazen, a Tennessee socialite who challenged social conventions in the 1930s.
Today we say farewell to Jane – and thanks, for her hard work building the foundation for many, many informative and useful conversations about energy.
About The Author
Mark Green joined API after a career in newspaper journalism, including 16 years as national editorial writer for The Oklahoman in the paper’s Washington bureau. Previously, Mark was a reporter, copy editor and sports editor at an assortment of newspapers. He earned his journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma and master’s in journalism and public affairs from American University. He and his wife Pamela have two grown children and six grandchildren.