News Organizations and Titles: Founder, editor and publisher, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, 1961-88; senior editor, Petroleum Week, McGraw-Hill, 1954-61; oil editor, Journal of Commerce, 1943-54.
Legacy: Ms. Jablonski deftly negotiated her way around the male-ruled oil industry and founded the highly respected "Petroleum Intelligence Weekly," which is credited with introducing investigative journalism to the oil world and assisting editors at Time, Newsweek and other general publications in interpreting complex events around the oil news of the 1970s.
Personal: Born Aug. 23, 1920, in Czechoslovakia; died Jan. 28, 1992, in New York City. She belonged to the Oxford Energy Policy Club and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Family: Each of her three marriages ended in divorce.
Education: Cornell University, B.A., 1942; master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, 1943.
Home run stories or accomplishments: In the late 1950s, she was one of the first journalists to visit the oil fields of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. While an office messenger at the Journal of Commerce in 1945, she filled in for the oil reporter and privately interviewed a Venezuelan official who told her he planned to nationalize foreign oil operations. That interview, and other contacts she later developed, indirectly influenced the formation of OPEC 15 years later.
What she made news or headlines for: After at least a dozen of her publication's 15-member staff walked out in June 1988, she continued to produce the newsletter until it was sold shortly thereafter to the Petroleum Intelligence Group. She bequeathed $27 million to the Strang Cancer Prevention Center in Manhattan--the largest donation in its history. She volunteered to serve as coordinator of the center's National High Risk Registry from 1988 until her death. While working there, she donated $3 million to the organization.
What others have said about her: From her obituary in the Petroleum Economist: "Before Wanda's advent, factual reporting and company handouts dominated those publications (oil industry newsletters) which existed. Blessed by a wealth of political and commercial stories, Wanda was able to produce a newsletter which, although widely thought of as 'not quite nice,' soon became required reading for governments and companies alike." Daniel Yergin, writing in "The Prize," his history of the oil business: Ms. Jablonski had the "savoir-faire required to get her through all sorts of situations," calling her "the most influential oil journalist of her time."