Technical Newsletter Keeps Subscribers Up to Date on Texas Natural Resources

Technical Newsletter Keeps Subscribers Up to Date on Texas Natural Resources

At a glance Eddie Selig Position: President, Texas Energy Research Associates, Inc. Age: 36 On his work: `"This business is a little like water skiing. You had better bend your knees and be flexible or you're going to sink." 

When the state Legislature shut down the Texas Energy and Natural Resources Advisory Council in mid-1983, Eddie Selig's life took a dramatic turn upward. 

Selig, one of the 65 people put out of work when the agency was closed, decided to create his own job rather than hunt for one. 

Sensing that the agency's closing would leave a gap in energy information coming from the state, Selig decided to set up his own business to help fill the void. 

"TENRAC closing down, I guess you could say was the best thing that happened to me," said Selig, 36, president of Texas Energy Research Associates, Inc. 

Working with $25,000 borrowed from a local bank, Selig started his own monthly newsletter, the Texas Energy Reporter, which contains everything from interviews with energy officials to oil and gas and electric utility statistics. The eight-page technical publication has been used as a seed for the company's other energy information services that have sprung up over the past six years. 

The company, which had sales of $300,000 last year, now provides a variety of information services to government and industry clients, including the newsletter, a newspaper-clipping service, an energy data base, energy marketing research and customized computer-assisted data collection. 

Undaunted by pessimistic advice from his peers about the pitfalls of the newsletter business, Selig started up his operation in a one-room office at 15th and Nueces streets. He spent much of his time initially scrambling to find mailing lists of possible newsletter subscribers. 

Selig recalls that the first few years were a real struggle. 

For one thing, Selig is working with his third bank - after the first two, United and Texas National, went under. 

"I seem to have spent a lot of time messing with banks that were closing and the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.)," Selig said. "It didn't make business any easier." 

Eventually, Selig begged, borrowed and bought enough lists to build a base of several hundred subscribers. At $85 a year, the publication is not for your everyday leisure reader, but it was not meant to be. 

As people came and went from the highly volatile energy business, Selig had to put as much energy into finding new subscribers as he did in getting the publication out every month. 

"The names were constantly changing as new people moved into the business and others fell out," Selig said. While the changes posed some logistical problems, the constant turnover meant more business because the new people were looking for information sources, he said. 

As he worked to get the newsletter on track, Selig began looking for other related projects. One early opportunity that knocked was a contract with the Texas Public Utility Commission to prepare a book describing the results of small-scale alternative-energy projects administered by the state for the federal government. 

Selig also was hired by the utility commission to help spread the word on energy efficiency in 1984 and came up with the idea of a telephone hotline number for Texans to call to get information on saving energy. 

Another break came three and a half years ago when Selig's firm was hired by the office of former Gov. Mark White to compile information on high-level radioactive waste disposal. At the time, the Texas Panhandle was being considered as a site for a federal repository for high-level radioactive wastes. The work involved putting on computer disks abstracts of everything from technical documents to newspaper clippings on the subject. 

"Basically, we took the raw data and packaged it into a manageable form that was readily accessible," Selig said. "It's a kind of electronic filing cabinet." 

That project has led to other similar ones, including several where law firms have hired Selig's firm to compile computerized summaries of all the documents in energy-related lawsuits. 

The increased workload allowed Selig to move his operations from the small downtown office to a suite on Balcones Drive in North Austin. This month, he moved operations again to larger - and cheaper - quarters a block away at 5926 Balcones Drive. 

Selig credits advances in computer technology as well as the city's glut of office space for his continued optimism about his firm. The office-space glut has allowed him to move to better quarters at a lower cost, he said. And computer advances have allowed him to cut in half the costs of producing the newsletter. The cost of the computers themselves has also dropped substantially, he added. 

Selig, who started out with only a part-time secretary, now has a five-person staff and has been working with the University of Texas Graduate School of Library and Information Science to get help as needed. The company recently completed a project using 30 graduate students part time for seven months to compile confidential data for an energy-related lawsuit, he said. 

Selig said he is negotiating with an energy industry group to serve as a clearinghouse for information on that industry.

Selig, who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with bachelor's and master's degrees in English in the mid-1970s, is a native of El Paso. His first job out of school was working for Texas Educational Consultative Services Inc., writing proposals for federal grants. He moved over to the state Capitol in 1979 to a job supervising messengers at the sergeant-at-arms office. 

Later that year he joined the staff of the newly formed energy advisory council as a technical information specialist, and became assistant to the executive director of the agency a year later. He stayed at that job until the agency was put to rest. 

For the past 12 years, Selig also has taught courses at Austin Community College in the fall and spring, most recently a class in technical writing. 

Selig believes the key to his company's future is its ability to adjust to the ever-changing needs of his clients in an unpredictable business. 

One change is that, beginning in July, the newsletter will be published quarterly rather than monthly, he said. The move will allow Selig to focus efforts on the more-lucrative computer data collection work. 

"This business is a little like water skiing," Selig said. "You had better bend your knees and be flexible or you're going to sink."