Deal for Use of Gas Pipeline Stirs Dispute on Competition
The New York Times, 03/26/01

Sale of Enron Unit To Sierra Pacific Becomes Unlikely
The Wall Street Journal, 03/26/01

Backing Bush Pays Off for Coal Industry Energy: Mineral is seen as key to 
halting power crisis. Officials also target pending regulatory rules.
Los Angeles Times, 03/26/01
Abreast of the Market
Hunting for Signs That Stocks Are Bottoming
The Wall Street Journal, 03/26/01
It's About Time: A growing number of services let viewers pick what they want 
to watch, when they want to watch it
The Wall Street Journal, 03/26/01
Overview --- Thumbs Up: What makes a good entertainment site click?
The Wall Street Journal, 03/26/01

What's News
United States
The Globe and Mail, 03/26/01

USA: Enron's deal to sell Portland General seen dead-WSJ.
Reuters English News Service, 03/26/01

Enron's 2 bln usd sale of PGE unit unlikely to go through - CEO
AFX News, 03/26/01

INDIA'S ESSAR MAY OPT OUT OF SHELL LNG VENTURE
Asia Pulse, 03/26/01



Business/Financial Desk; Section A
Deal for Use of Gas Pipeline Stirs Dispute on Competition
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and LOWELL BERGMAN

03/26/2001
The New York Times
Page 1, Column 4
c. 2001 New York Times Company

Early last year, the El Paso Natural Gas Company took bids from two dozen 
companies for the right to ship enough natural gas through its pipeline from 
Texas and New Mexico to meet one-sixth of the daily demand of energy-starved 
California. 
The winner: El Paso's sister company, the El Paso Merchant Energy Company, 
which buys, sells and trades natural gas. The bidding was not close. El Paso 
Merchant offered twice as much for the capacity as the other companies bid, 
in total, for bits and pieces.
Why pay so much more? California officials, who are pressing a complaint 
against El Paso at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, say the answer 
is simple. The state contends that El Paso Merchant, with help from its 
sister company, saw the transaction as a way to manipulate the price of 
natural gas by using its control of pipeline capacity. 
According to sealed documents obtained by The New York Times that are part of 
filings in the federal case, executives at El Paso Merchant said internally 
that the deal would give them ''more control'' of gas markets, including the 
''ability to influence the physical market'' to benefit the company's 
financial positions. 
El Paso executives called the accusations fanciful, and in a formal response 
to California's complaint, said the state ''grossly distorted'' company 
documents by quoting words and phrases out of context. 
The dispute opens a window on an important debate about oversight of the 
natural gas industry, which fuels a growing share of the nation's electric 
power plants. 
At issue is whether current safeguards do enough to prevent anticompetitive 
abuses in the marketing and trading of natural gas, and whether federal 
regulators adequately enforce existing rules. In particular, many industry 
officials question whether regulated pipeline companies are able to favor 
unregulated sister companies that trade natural gas and are free to maximize 
profits. 
More than 200,000 miles of interstate pipelines crisscross the country, 
moving natural gas from Canada, the Southwest and other producing regions to 
fuel factories, power utilities and heat houses. 
Not long ago, many parts of the country had excess pipeline capacity. But 
experts say that several regions, including California, New York and New 
England, now face constraints as demand soars for gas to fuel power plants. 
In California, state officials and utility executives said the documents in 
the federal case, and El Paso's actions, were proof that the state's energy 
crisis stemmed not just from an ill-conceived deregulation plan but from 
price manipulation and profiteering. 
''They are the market maker with this pipeline,'' said Loretta Lynch, the 
president of the California Public Utilities Commission, which has struggled 
to cope with skyrocketing power prices and supply shortages. 
El Paso ''sets the price in California,'' Ms. Lynch said, and what it did was 
intentional. ''It has affected the price,'' she said, ''for everything 
related to heat and electrical power prices in the state.'' 
California's complaint to the federal agency contends that El Paso Merchant 
''has hoarded capacity and refused to attractively price unused capacity'' on 
the pipeline. The state also charges that El Paso Natural Gas, the pipeline's 
owner, has had no incentive to spur competition, by offering discounts to 
other users, because the two companies are corporate siblings. The state said 
that El Paso had violated federal natural gas statutes that prohibit 
anticompetitive behavior. 
The sealed filings in the El Paso case indicated that the company expected to 
make money by widening the ''basis spread'' -- the difference between what 
gas can be bought for in producing basins of Texas and New Mexico, at one end 
of the pipeline, and its price on delivery to Southern California. 
As it turned out, spreads widened enormously over the last year as the price 
of gas soared in California, adding to costs for wholesale electricity that 
pushed the biggest utilities near bankruptcy. California utilities paid $6.2 
billion above competitive prices for wholesale electricity over the last 10 
months, state officials estimated. The utilities are not allowed to recoup 
the costs from customers. While the cost of 1,000 cubic feet of gas typically 
is less than $1 higher at the California end of the pipeline, spot prices in 
the state rose to almost $50 more than the Texas-New Mexico price in 
December. 
To executives of the parent company, the El Paso Corporation, the accusations 
of market manipulation are ludicrous. 
High gas prices in California, El Paso executives said in interviews, are 
easily explained by soaring demand, the poor credit standing of the state's 
utilities and the failure of the utilities to retain pipeline capacity or 
store enough gas for winter. 
''The idea that anybody is holding back on California is really ridiculous,'' 
said Clark C. Smith, president of El Paso Merchant's operations in North 
America. 
Some El Paso customers, though, agreed with California officials. The Pacific 
Gas & Electric Company, the San Francisco-based utility, condemned El Paso in 
a filing with the federal agency after its lawyers reviewed the sealed 
company documents. 
''It is now very clear from the business records of El Paso Energy 
Corporation,'' the utility said in the filing, ''that the business strategy 
El Paso Merchant was authorized at the highest corporate levels to pursue 
involved manipulation of price spreads.'' 
The agency has not ruled on California's complaint, which asks that the deal 
between El Paso Natural Gas and El Paso Merchant be invalidated. Based on the 
agency's history of policing energy providers lightly, many industry 
observers predicted that the complaint would be dismissed, perhaps as soon as 
the agency's public meeting on Wednesday. 
Nonetheless, El Paso Merchant is feeling some pressure. The subsidiary said 
recently that it planned to relinquish control of all but about 22 percent of 
the capacity on the pipeline to California, rather than exercise an option 
that would have allowed it to retain the entire capacity of 1.2 billion cubic 
feet of gas a day. 
Critics said they believed El Paso made the move in hopes of lessening the 
chance of government action. El Paso executives deny that but do say that 
their decision was influenced by the backlash over the arrangement. 
Surrendering the pipeline capacity made for a ''gut-wrenching'' decision, Mr. 
Smith said, but was ''a first-class gesture'' to California. El Paso Merchant 
paid $38.5 million to control the pipeline capacity from March 1, 2000, until 
May 31, 2001. While Mr. Clark said he did not know the return on that 
investment, he acknowledged that it was lucrative. 
''No doubt about it,'' Mr. Clark said, ''we made good money.'' 
The question of whether El Paso's conduct has driven gas prices higher is 
expected to be scrutinized by legislators in Sacramento this week. The 
company also faces several lawsuits, including one by the city of Los 
Angeles, that accuse it of conspiring with other companies to prevent 
pipeline projects that could have eased California's energy crisis. El Paso 
denied the accusation. 
With pipeline capacity and gas supplies tighter, concerns about 
anticompetitive behavior have increased as price volatility has created 
soaring profits for energy marketers and traders. 
Dynegy Inc., a Houston-based energy trader, was once the target of complaints 
to federal regulators that it had artificially raised prices by abusing 
capacity that it controlled on El Paso's pipeline to California. 
In a filing with regulators in January, Dynegy contended that pipeline 
companies routinely favored affiliates. ''Abuses abound because of financial 
windfalls, difficulty of detection, lengthy investigations and increased 
complexity of the market,'' the company said. 
''There are some red flags right now,'' said William L. Massey, a member of 
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission since 1993. Mr. Massey said he was 
troubled by the potential for abuses when pipeline companies own gas and 
power marketing subsidiaries as well as electric plants fueled by natural 
gas. El Paso is in all those businesses. 
''What the commission ought to be serious about is: What are the forces at 
work? Is it simply robust markets responding to true supply-and-demand 
signals, or is it a market defined by market power and some measure of 
affiliate abuse?'' he said. 
Many in the industry do not believe changes are needed. 
''There are rules in place today that protect against affiliate abuse,'' said 
Stanley Horton, chief executive for gas pipeline operations at the Enron 
Corporation and chairman of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of 
America, the industry's trade group, referring to the rules under which 
California has brought its complaint about El Paso. 
To its critics, El Paso epitomizes the competitive concerns. It operates the 
nation's largest network of interstate pipelines and owns one of the largest 
reserves of natural gas. With its recent acquisition of the Coastal 
Corporation, another large pipeline operator, El Paso has a market 
capitalization of $32 billion. 
At a conference at El Paso headquarters in Houston in February, analysts 
heard executives predict net profits of $1.7 billion this year. El Paso's 
much better known rival, Enron, with its headquarters a few blocks away, is 
expected to earn about $1.4 billion. 
El Paso Merchant provides the strongest growth. Two years ago, the unit's 
profits, before interest payments and taxes, were $99 million; this year, it 
is expected to have $700 million in North America alone. In its latest 
quarterly report, El Paso attributed those profits, in part, to ''commodity 
market and trading margins'' that were enhanced by ''power price volatility, 
particularly in the Western United States.'' 
Critics contend that El Paso set out to exploit those conditions. According 
to the sealed filings, on Feb. 14, 2000, the day before El Paso Merchant was 
awarded the pipeline capacity, executives made a presentation to William A. 
Wise, chief executive of the parent company, laying out the rationale for the 
bid. 
The presentation outlined what it termed ''strategic advantages,'' including 
''more control of total physical markets'' and the ''ability to influence the 
physical market to the benefit of any financial/hedge position,'' according 
to the sealed filings. The passages suggested that El Paso expected the deal 
to give it sway over the market for trading actual volumes of gas and to 
support financial transactions it had entered into with other parties to 
limit its risk. 
For every one-cent increase in the spread on gas prices, the presentation 
said, El Paso Merchant stood to make an additional $2.4 million. 
Under the heading ''Challenges,'' according to the sealed filings, the 
presentation stated that storage was needed ''to help manipulate physical 
spreads, adding to the overall transport/storage cost.'' 
On April 14, according to the sealed filings, El Paso Merchant's president at 
the time, Greg G. Jenkins, wrote a memorandum to Mr. Wise involving an update 
for directors meeting later that month. The memorandum stated: ''We will make 
money two ways: 1) increase the load factor, 2) widen the basis spread.'' 
The language appears to suggest that El Paso Merchant would profit by 
increasing the gas flow in the pipeline -- the load factor -- while 
increasing the difference between what gas could be bought for at one end and 
what it could be sold for at the other end -- the basis spread. 
In an interview, Mr. Smith, the El Paso Merchant executive, said that the 
unit's prices, and profits, on bulk gas sales in California were locked in 
months in advance, so that the company could not benefit from rising prices 
in the spot market. 
Otherwise, Mr. Smith declined to provide any details about money made on the 
pipeline deal or about financial terms of the transactions that locked in 
prices ahead of time. In addition, Mr. Smith said that nearly all of El Paso 
Merchant's pipeline capacity was used every day when prices spiked late last 
year, with no capacity withheld to increase prices. 
The company did not respond last week to a request to discuss information in 
the sealed documents. But El Paso Merchant, in a filing with federal 
regulators, said California's complaint had ''misconstrued and incorrectly 
interpreted'' what it termed ''snippets of data.'' 
About This Report 
This article and others on California's energy problems are part of a joint 
effort with the PBS series ''Frontline'' that will result in a documentary 
later this year.


Photo: The El Paso Natural Gas pipeline passes near Topock, Ariz. A dispute 
over bidding for its use has spurred a debate about oversight of the 
industry. (John Gurzinski for The New York Times)(pg. A17) Chart: ''Boom 
Times'' Operating revenue and net income soared last year at the El Paso 
Corpor 2/3ation, which sells, transports and trades natural gas. Graphs of 
the operating revenue and the net income for the El Paso Corporation. 
(Source: Company reports)(pg. A17) Chart: ''A Spike in Prices'' The spot 
price for natural gas produced in the Permian Basin of West Texas doubled 
last year. But the price that power generators paid when the gas was 
delivered to Southern California rose almost 10-fold. State regulators say 
the gap is evidence of market manipulation. Graph showing the spot price of 
gas delivered to Southern California and the spot price of gas bought in the 
Permian Basin, from September to March. (Source: Gas Daily)(pg. A17) 

Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 


Marketing & Media
Sale of Enron Unit To Sierra Pacific Becomes Unlikely
By Rebecca Smith
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

03/26/2001
The Wall Street Journal
B10
(Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

Enron Corp.'s $2 billion agreement to sell its Portland General Electric unit 
to Sierra Pacific Resources may be the latest casualty of the energy crisis 
spreading across the Western part of the U.S. 
There is only a "5% probability" that the sale will go through, Enron's chief 
executive, Jeffrey Skilling, said Friday. Sierra Pacific has been unable to 
sell its interest in certain generating assets, which it needed to do to 
complete the purchase from the Houston-based energy and trading company. 
Sierra Pacific agreed in November 1999 to buy Portland General for $2 billion 
and the assumption of $1 billion of debt.
Confirmation that the deal was in trouble didn't come as a surprise to 
investors because the financial picture has changed considerably as the 
West's power problems have become more acute. When the pact was announced, 
the companies said they expected a transaction to take place by mid-2000. 
Sierra Pacific has been hurt by rising energy costs, which resulted in a 
financial setback last year. Sierra, Reno, Nev., which operates two Nevada 
utilities, said it incurred an unanticipated expense of $889 million in 2000 
to purchase fuel and electricity on the open market. That produced a full 
year 2000 loss of $39.8 million, or 51 cents a share. On Friday, the company 
couldn't be reached for comment about its plans. 
Mr. Skilling said he's "not in a particular rush" to sell Portland General, 
which Enron acquired in 1996, although he said he would like to put the money 
to work in higher-profit businesses. There are "several billion dollars worth 
of assets" that Enron will sell "in the next few years" in its quest to 
maximize its returns, he said. 
Mr. Skilling, in an effort to quell worries that spurred a recent selloff in 
the firm's stock, said Enron is moving more heavily into the trading of 
liquified natural gas and is considering exercising options to acquire three 
LNG vessels as well as to develop LNG gasification facilities in the Bahamas 
and Venezuela. He said Enron Online, the firm's Internet-based trading 
platform, soon will begin trading LNG contracts, as well. 
The recent stock-price decline stemmed from jitters about Enron's plans for 
its broadband business. The company, which pioneered the trading of 
telecommunications bandwidth, plans to cut capital spending on its 
fiber-optics network to about $250 million this year from an earlier 
estimated budget of $750 million, Mr. Skilling said. He said the company has 
found it can acquire much of the telecommunications capacity it needs to 
expand its businesses through contracts with other owners rather than by 
building additional network capacity, itself. 
Mr. Skilling said Enron is reassigning some employees within the company, but 
he denied speculation that Enron is planning layoffs in the broadband unit. 
He said Enron is constantly shifting people around to meet the company's 
growth needs. 
Mr. Skilling said he still expects Enron to earn $1.70 to $1.75 per share 
this year and said it was "crazy" that the company's stock has slid from 
about $80 per share in early February to about $55 late last week. In 4 p.m. 
Friday New York Stock Exchange composite trading, Enron rose $4.38, or 8%, to 
$59.40. He said Enron's "core businesses" all are in "great shape." Despite 
the fact California's utilities aren't paying their bills, Enron's credit 
exposure in that state is declining, he said.

Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

National Desk
Backing Bush Pays Off for Coal Industry Energy: Mineral is seen as key to 
halting power crisis. Officials also target pending regulatory rules.
From the Washington Post

03/26/2001
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
A-10
Copyright 2001 / The Times Mirror Company

WASHINGTON -- In the last election, few businesses placed as big a bet on 
Republicans as the coal industry, which gave 88 cents out of every dollar in 
campaign contributions to GOP candidates or organizations. Two months into 
the Bush administration, that wager has begun to pay off. 
President Bush has jettisoned a campaign promise to require coal-burning 
power plants to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, after heeding industry 
warnings that such action could "kill coal." Now, industry officials who 
worked for last week's Environmental Protection Agency decision to revoke a 
Clinton administration crackdown on arsenic in drinking water are taking aim 
at more than two dozen pending rules regulating substances from coal mine 
dust and ozone to diesel particulates.
In the GOP-controlled Congress, lobbyists for coal companies, railroads and 
electric utilities are mobilizing behind tax credits, subsidies and 
regulatory exemptions for coal-burning utilities. 
The emergence of coal from the political shadows is due in part to Bush's 
conviction that the mineral, which is used to generate half the nation's 
electricity, is crucial to preventing the spread of California's energy 
crisis. 
Coal's new strength also rests on the enhanced influence, in the aftermath of 
last year's election, of a network of interests, such as electric utilities 
and railroads, that strongly oppose lessening the country's dependence on 
coal. 
Meanwhile, coal, rail and power companies such as Peabody Holdings Inc., 
Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the Southern Co. provided funding last year 
to start Americans for Balanced Energy Choices to develop grass-roots support 
for coal. 
"The market realities have changed, and the political dynamics have changed 
in Washington," said the group's president, Steve Miller, a Democrat who was 
Bill Clinton's campaign organizational chairman in Kentucky in 1992. "People 
have no idea of the environmental improvement the coal industry has made." 
To get that message across, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices has set up 
a Web site and prepared a media advertising budget of several million dollars 
to finance what Miller says will be "a longtime conversation with opinion 
leaders across the country." 
Electric utilities and their executives and employees last year gave $18.4 
million to candidates and parties, of which $12.4 million went to 
Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign 
research group. Southern Co., one of the nation's largest coal-burning power 
producers, opposes the Kyoto, Japan, protocol, under which signatory nations, 
including the United States, agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 
1990 levels. The Senate has never ratified the agreement. 
In the House, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the subcommittee with 
jurisdiction over clean air and energy, has vowed that legislation containing 
such restrictions will "never" pass through his panel. 
The chief executive of the Enron Corp. energy company, Kenneth Lay, one of 
Bush's most generous campaign supporters, has urged the president to create a 
trading system for carbon as a way of limiting emissions into the atmosphere. 
But Lay was not given advance notice of Bush's decision ruling out mandatory 
carbon controls, sources said. 
A spokesman said Lay was "somewhat disappointed that we don't have a process 
in place to deal with what he thinks is going to be a significant issue."



Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

Abreast of the Market
Hunting for Signs That Stocks Are Bottoming
By E.S. Browning
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

03/26/2001
The Wall Street Journal
C1
(Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

It sounds like the latest gimmicky TV show: "Looking for the Bottom." 
But that search is what is most on the minds of investors and stock-market 
analysts today, after the Dow Jones Industrial Average dived for most of last 
week and then, finally, rebounded Friday. The beaten-up Nasdaq Composite 
Index, meanwhile, was able actually to scrape out an "up" week.
Longtime market watchers say there are telltale signs to look for, signaling 
a market bottom. The problem is that different market declines end in 
different ways. 
"Some market bottoms are quiet and some are violent," notes analyst Sam Burns 
of market-research group Ned Davis Research, in Venice, Fla. "The signals 
aren't always consistent." The trick, he says, is to figure out which set of 
signals apply to the market at hand. 
In 1987, for example, the downturn ended with a crash, a one-day collapse of 
22.6% in the Dow industrials, after which the worst was over. It was what 
analysts call an extreme case of "capitulation," or the massive selling of 
stocks by investors who suddenly fell out of love with them. 
But then there are the examples of 1974, 1982 and 1990. "Those bear markets 
died with a whimper, not a bang," says Steve Leuthold, chairman of 
money-management firm Leuthold Group in Minneapolis. The selling just 
gradually dried up, and one day, stocks turned around and started up again. 
Mr. Leuthold says you can make some sense out of the seeming contradictions 
by dividing bear markets into two varieties: those that are caused by 
economic downturns and those that occur at other times. 
"You get V-shaped bottoms typically when it is a noneconomic bear market, a 
bear market that isn't related to a recession, the kind of thing we saw in 
1987 and 1998," he says, referring in the latter case to the Russia-spurred 
declines that left the industrials just shy of a bear-market drop by strict 
definition. "But if you have a recession related to it, which I think is what 
we have in this case, it takes a while. There is a base building and you have 
the bear market kind of die with a whimper." 
But if the current decline is going to end gradually and recover more slowly, 
how will investors know that the worst is over? Messrs. Leuthold and Burns 
and other market analysts have put together a group of signs they look for in 
markets such as this one. Those include the levels of the price-to-earnings 
ratios of the major indexes, the number of months since the economic downturn 
began, and the tendency of major indexes to fall back and "retest" their lows 
after they hit bottom. 
All of these measures suggest that stocks could be at the beginning of a 
bottom-building process now, these experts say. But, because "no one rings a 
bell at the bottom," as Mr. Leuthold puts it, there isn't any guarantee that 
the market won't fall somewhat farther before it finally hits bottom. Even if 
the bottom is occurring right now, it could be weeks, or months, or longer, 
before stocks begin any strong, lasting rally. 
There certainly was plenty in last week's market activity to make the 
optimists hope they were seeing a bottom. In less than three days, from their 
intraday high on Tuesday through their intraday low on Thursday, the Dow 
industrials fell 9.1%, or 913.40 points, to 9106.54. That pullback left the 
index, for a few hours, down 22.8% from its record close of 11722.98, hit on 
Jan. 14 of last year. 
If the index had closed at that level, the industrials would have been 
considered, by the most common definition of a 20% drop from a closing high, 
to be in a bear market. But suddenly, about 80 minutes before Thursday's 
close, the nosedive ended. By the end of the day Friday, when the index rose 
115.30, it was 18.9% off the record, still outside bear-market territory by a 
statistical hair. 
It still was a painful week, with the industrials finishing down 3.2%, or 
318.63 points for the week, at 9504.78. The fact that the selling finally 
broadened out to the blue chips is being cited by some analysts as one more 
sign that the selloff could be nearing its end. The Nasdaq composite, which 
had taken the brunt of the selling for months, was able to advance last week 
-- up 2%, or 37.77 points, to 1928.68 (on Friday it gained 30.98). 
How likely is it that last week marked the bottom? One way to gauge that, Mr. 
Leuthold says, is that stocks tend to bottom out halfway through an economic 
slowdown. He thinks the economy began its slump in December, adding that the 
average recession since World War II has lasted 11 months. If this decline 
lasts that long, stocks might start to recover in May or June. If the 
downturn is shorter, the recovery can come sooner, and vice versa. 
Another measure that Mr. Leuthold looks at is valuation. In times of serious 
economic decline, following periods of sharp inflation and high interest 
rates, major stock indexes have fallen to the point that they were trading at 
seven or eight times their stocks' earnings for the past 12 months. But in 
times of less severe economic turmoil, such as the present, the indexes have 
tended to fall to around 15 times trailing earnings. 
This time, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index still trades at about 22 
times trailing earnings, but a broader group of 3,000 stocks that Mr. 
Leuthold tracks trades at a median of only about 14 times earnings. That 
makes him believe that many stocks are close to a bottom now. (He thinks that 
the S&P 500 may never actually fall to a P/E of 15, because of the way its 
makeup has been revised over the past few years.) 
Stock strategist Thomas McManus of Banc of America Securities, for his part, 
likes to look at indicators of investor "sentiment," which track whether 
people are feeling bullish or bearish. The Market Vane indicator, which 
measures the advice given by professional investment advisers, currently 
shows that only 19% are bullish on S&P 500 futures, an unusually low level of 
bullishness. When investor sentiment is that negative, many analysts believe, 
stocks can begin to recover, because most of the selling already has run its 
course. 
A number of formerly bearish investors have turned bullish in the past few 
weeks, believing that a bottom is at hand. Mr. Leuthold is one -- he even is 
beginning to think that some technology stocks, notably semiconductor stocks, 
may have fallen far enough to be cheap. 
Another recently minted optimist is Robert Morris, chief investment officer 
at Jersey City, N.J., fund-management group Lord Abbett, who until last year 
considered technology stocks in particular to be greatly overvalued. He 
points out that, in the past, stocks have tended to move up 25% in the 12 
months after a third successive Federal Reserve rate cut. On top of that, his 
models separately show the S&P 500 and the Dow industrials so undervalued 
that they could rise as much as 25% in the next 12 months. 
"We may bounce around for a while, but now we have a reason to own stocks 
again," Mr. Morris says. He adds that one last indicator is a sign that bank 
stocks -- very sensitive now to worries about bad debt -- have begun to 
recover. "Once the market buys that and confirms it with better relative 
strength for the banks, we will be ready to go," he says. 
Many analysts think that it could still be some time before a true rally 
kicks in. The market could go through a protracted period of consolidating 
and retesting its lows. "That means that you don't have to be in a hurry to 
buy right at the bottom; you have some time," Mr. Burns says. 
--- 
Friday's Market Activity 
Stocks turned higher across the board as a rough week for blue chips ended on 
a positive note. 
The big gains came out of some of the banking and brokerage-firm issues that 
sold off earlier in the week as the market's fortunes worsened. Shares of 
J.P. Morgan Chase added $2.80 to $41.71, Citigroup rose 2.25 to 42.85, and 
Bank of America moved ahead 3.11 to 52.78. 
Goldman Sachs Group improved 3.90 to 89.81, Merrill Lynch tacked on 3.25 to 
57.70, and Lehman Brothers Holdings gained 2.55 to 67.35. 
Shares of Applied Materials advanced 81 cents to 50.25 in Nasdaq Stock Market 
trading, after the semiconductor-gear maker affirmed the company's 
second-quarter outlook for revenue and earnings. That helped dispel some of 
the doubt about capital spending in technology products and equipment that 
has been at the heart of the market's recent distress. 
Motorola also made progress, adding 31 cents to 15.99, after the cellphone 
and chip manufacturer announced plans to cut jobs to further reduce its 
costs. 
Shares of Tibco Software, which came into the session off the 52-week low of 
7.22 reached Thursday, climbed 2.41 to 10.44 on Nasdaq, after the 
enterprise-software producer posted fiscal first-quarter earnings that beat 
analysts' lowered estimates. 
The industrial average also got a big push from its software and 
personal-computer makers. The groups started to rally Thursday on talk from 
chip manufacturer Micron Technology that some of the inventory problems in 
the supply chain had been alleviated. Microsoft advanced 2.56 to 56.56 in 
Nasdaq trading, while International Business Machines climbed 4.58 to 93.68. 
Micron, which rose 11% Thursday, tacked on 2.13 to 48.83 Friday. 
Nokia gained 1.46 to 26.46. The Finnish handset maker said it will buy back 
as many as 50 million shares of its stock. 
Quest Diagnostics rose 3.88 to 82.92, while Laboratory Corp. of America 
improved 7.18 to 119. Thomas Weisel Partners started coverage of several of 
the companies that provide laboratory testing services, including these 
names. 
Gemstar International added 6.25 to 35.19 on Nasdaq. The Pasadena, Calif., 
provider of electronic-program guides and video-recording systems agreed to 
provide interactive television services to Comcast Cable's Comcast Cable 
Communications subscribers. Comcast, King of Prussia, Pa., eased 1.81 to 
38.69 in Nasdaq trading. 
Nucor lost 81 cents to 40.46. The Charlotte, N.C., metals and mining concern 
reduced its first-quarter earnings expectations, citing a weak pricing 
environment for steel products and what it called "relatively flat" sales 
volume. 
Immunex slid 7.38 to 11.50 on Nasdaq, slumping to a 52-week low. The Seattle 
biopharmaceuticals developer stopped its late-stage clinical trials on 
patients who suffer chronic heart failure. Were the tests to have been 
successful, Immunex could have doubled the market for its blockbuster drug, 
Enbrel, which is used to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis. American 
Home Products, which owns 41% of Immunex, declined 1.10 to 54.40. 
Enron gained 4.38 to 59.40. The energy provider and commodities trader perked 
up following losses this week after company officials, on a conference call 
with investors, reiterated the Houston concern's existing earnings forecasts. 
New York Stock Exchange volume totaled 1,360,250,410 shares, compared with 
1,723,955,410 Thursday. 
-- Robert O'Brien



Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

Entertainment + Technology (A Special Report)
It's About Time: A growing number of services let viewers pick what they want 
to watch, when they want to watch it
By Martin Peers

03/26/2001
The Wall Street Journal
R14
(Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

When Christopher Lindsell wants to watch a movie nowadays, the 29-year-old 
Cincinnati research scientist plops down on his couch with his wife and son 
and checks out Intertainer.TV, a new entertainment service available via 
computer. 
With Intertainer, Mr. Lindsell can order a movie in advance, watch it when he 
wants and even pause it while he gets more snacks -- all with a click of the 
mouse.
"We really like the convenience," says Mr. Lindsell. "We like the ability to 
click a few buttons, see a preview, see a brief description. We have children 
in the household, so we like to see whether it contains adult content. We can 
then sit down as a family. [We] don't have to plan ahead." 
Mr. Lindsell is one of about 2,400 people in the Cincinnati area able to 
order movies or television shows from Intertainer, which delivers programming 
via souped-up telephone lines or digital cable through the computer to the TV 
set. Viewers can order everything from editions of "Meet the Press" or "NBC 
Nightly News" an hour after they're aired to recently released movies such as 
"Gladiator" and older films, for prices ranging from 75 cents to $3.99. The 
programs run like they're in a videocassette recorder: Viewers can stop, 
start and rewind them as much as they want within 24 hours of the initial 
order. 
Intertainer is one of a number of emerging electronic-entertainment services 
that allow consumers to order movies and TV shows and watch them at their 
leisure. But Intertainer Inc.'s service has a head start in getting 
programming. The Culver City, Calif., company has signed long-term supply 
deals with several Hollywood studios, such as the Warner Brothers unit of AOL 
Time Warner Inc. and Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Pictures, while its 
rivals are still in negotiations on such deals. Intertainer also has deals 
for TV programming from General Electric Co.'s NBC, as well as several cable 
networks such as Discovery Channel and A&E Television Networks, which 
includes the History Channel and the Biography Channel. 
Intertainer is a closely held company whose investors include its founders, 
Chairman Richard Baskin and Chief Executive Jonathan Taplin, as well as big 
companies like Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Comcast Corp. and NBC. 
Right now, Intertainer is available only to a small number of people in 
Cincinnati, through Internet-access company Zoomtown.com, a unit of Broadwing 
Inc., a telecommunications concern based in Cincinnati. But Intertainer 
expects the service to be available in many more major markets over the next 
few months. 
The service is similar in some ways to the pay-per-view options offered on 
cable or satellite-TV systems, giving consumers the ability to pick a movie 
they want to watch for a fee. Pay-per-view, however, offers only a few movies 
at fixed times, whereas Intertainer allows consumers to scroll through a list 
of several hundred movies or TV shows and order one immediately. 
Intertainer isn't offered over the Internet, like many of the other services 
such as SightSound.com from SightSound Technologies of Mount Lebanon, Pa. The 
company decided against making its service available on the Internet largely 
to ensure its movies and TV shows had the best picture quality and because of 
concerns from the major Hollywood studios over rampant illegal copying on the 
Web. 
Instead, the company sends its signals over private computer networks, 
connecting to homes either by high-speed phone lines known as digital 
subscriber lines or by digital cable. Consumers can buy a device that 
switches the signal from their computer to their TV set. Intertainer has a 
Web site that offers music videos and movie trailers to promote the main 
service, and allows for some e-commerce opportunities, like selling albums. 
Customers getting Intertainer through DSL, currently the most common way to 
get the service, usually would log onto Intertainer through their computer, 
clicking on an Intertainer icon on the DSL provider's home Web page that gets 
them into a private computer network. After typing in a password, customers 
first choose a movie genre (comedies, dramas, action) and then pick a film in 
that genre. Consumers find the movie they want to watch, order with a click 
of a mouse and get billed either through their credit card or their DSL 
provider. (Cable operators would likely make Intertainer available as an 
added feature of digital cable, available through a set-top box with remote 
control.) 
For encrypting and playing programming, Intertainer is using Microsoft's 
Windows Media software. The software giant also will integrate the service in 
its Microsoft TV software, which is being put in set-top boxes for 
interactive-TV services of some cable and satellite-TV operators. That 
integration makes it easier for these companies to offer Intertainer. 
Supplementing revenue from movie and TV orders, Intertainer aims to generate 
one-third of its revenue from advertising and e-commerce. The Web site allows 
consumers to play a music video and then click onto a site selling the 
related album. Intertainer also has interactive features built into some of 
its advertising, enabling viewers to get information and make a purchase. 
While consumers who have used Intertainer or other movies-on-demand services 
are enthusiastic, there are still big hurdles to overcome before the services 
are widely available. 
Intertainer is facing plenty of competition, both on and off the Web. Cable 
operators like AOL Time Warner and Cox Communications Inc. are planning to 
offer their own service. Some of the Hollywood studios are planning to launch 
their own Web-based services, while some independent Web concerns are 
offering movies on demand, although with a very limited number of movies. 
But Intertainer is ahead of most of its rivals when it comes to programming. 
Most cable operators are still negotiating long-term deals. And the 
independent Web-based services are finding it difficult to get movies from 
major studios because of worries about illegal copying. Programming's 
importance was highlighted earlier this month when another potential rival, a 
joint venture of Blockbuster Inc. and Enron Corp., abandoned its efforts 
because of Blockbuster's difficulty in negotiating movie-supply deals. 
Meanwhile, Intertainer currently offers about 300 movies and 25 different 
types of TV shows at any one time, though its programming deals give it 
access to between 8,000 and 10,000 movies. However, making all the movies 
available simultaneously would be prohibitively expensive. Intertainer 
expects new computer-network designs and the declining cost of data storage 
will enable it to increase the number of movies offered at the same time 
within a couple of years. 
Also putting a crimp on movies-on-demand services' offerings are major 
Hollywood studios. Because of concerns of illegal copying, the studios have 
been reluctant to provide movies and shows. Avoiding the Internet altogether 
has helped Intertainer get more programming, but it has forced the company to 
rely on phone companies or cable operators to offer its service. And most of 
the programming available on Intertainer is at least several months old, 
reflecting Hollywood's desire not to threaten the mountains of revenue they 
get from video rental chains by giving Intertainer movies before they're 
offered on video. 
As a result, Intertainer -- like other movies-on-demand services -- doesn't 
offer movies until after they've been in the video stores. That is likely to 
reduce the number of orders for Intertainer, which gives an undisclosed share 
of its program fee to its entertainment providers. Mr. Lindsell, for 
instance, says his family also rents movies from video-rental stores but 
would use Intertainer as his "primary source" once the service has "more 
diverse product" available. 
Agreements with cable networks licensing their shows to Intertainer come with 
similar caveats. When A&E Television Networks agreed in January to provide 
programming to Intertainer, David Zagin, senior vice president of affiliate 
sales, says the deal was limited to older titles in the company's library -- 
which could be anywhere from a few months to a few years old. Offering newly 
aired programs for Intertainer's on-demand service could reduce the need for 
consumers to watch the networks on cable. 
"We never want to give people the impression you don't have to have A&E and 
History" on cable, Mr. Zagin says. A&E is owned by Walt Disney Co., Hearst 
Corp. and NBC. 
Discovery Networks has a similar stance. Discovery, a unit of Discovery 
Communications Inc. of Bethesda, Md., supplies "library" products, shows 
roughly six months old, from its networks, which include Discovery Channel, 
the Learning Channel, Animal Planet and the Travel Channel. These shows 
include Discovery Channel's "Ultimate Guide," a travel-adventure series 
focusing on exotic destinations like the Amazon. David Karp, a senior vice 
president of interactive television for Discovery Networks U.S., says the 
on-demand offering is a "companion" business to the primary business of 
running its cable networks. 
"We are not going to do anything that will detract from our programming 
networks," he says. 
NBC's deal does give Intertainer the right to offer slightly delayed editions 
of "NBC Nightly News" and "Meet the Press." But the agreement also gives 
Intertainer programming from NBC's library, including episodes of "Saturday 
Night Live," movies of the week, comedies and dramas. The shows could date as 
far back as 20 years. Indeed, NBC doesn't want to threaten the value of newer 
shows in the hugely profitable television syndication market, where 
independent TV stations buy programming, says a person close to the network. 
But even with the content constraints, Intertainer's Mr. Taplin believes the 
company can build a commercial service from the programming it has. Mr. 
Taplin says the company needs about half a million subscribers ordering at 
least one movie every three months to break even. It now has about $30 
million in the bank, enough to keep the service running until the end of 
2002, though Mr. Taplin hopes to raise more money from existing and new 
investors. 
Reaching that half-a-million target will largely depend on Intertainer's 
ability to get into homes as well as beat the competition. Lydia Loizides, an 
analyst in the digital-TV group of New York-based Jupiter Research, says 
Intertainer is "very solid on the content-partnership side" and had a better 
than 50-50 chance of meeting its target. She notes, however, that cable 
operators and telephone companies are planning to "go after the same dollars 
that are in consumers' wallets, so who gets there first is something to be 
determined." 
So far, most cable operators are opting to offer their own version of movies 
on demand, licensing the movies through an industry-owned consortium or 
through other services. The only cable operator to be actively working with 
Intertainer is Comcast, one of the nation's biggest cable operators. Comcast 
is currently testing just the movies-on-demand part of Intertainer's service 
as an additional feature on its digital-cable service. It's unclear whether 
Comcast will offer Intertainer once it has completed the test, say people 
familiar with the situation. 
All that means is that Intertainer will likely have to rely mostly on 
telephone companies' DSL services in order for the service to grow. In 
Cincinnati, Zoomtown President Michael O'Brien says he plans to expand the 
offering to all Zoomtown's 40,000 DSL customers in the first half of this 
year. Qwest Communications International Inc. of Denver also is testing 
Intertainer's service on its DSL lines and plans to introduce it in half a 
dozen markets, including Seattle, Portland, Ore., Denver and Phoenix. Mr. 
Taplin hopes Qwest will roll it out commercially by April, although a Qwest 
spokeswoman wouldn't confirm the timing of the rollout. 
Mr. Taplin also hopes Intertainer will be available in major markets like New 
York "by the end of the summer" through telephone companies like Verizon 
Communications Inc.'s DSL service. A Verizon spokesman says the company was 
doing technical trials -- offering "many" video-on-demand services, including 
Intertainer, free to some of its customers. The spokesman says Verizon "won't 
speculate" on when these services would be commercially available. 
A major rollout of Intertainer would help persuade studios and networks to 
give up more timely content. Mr. Taplin says getting newer movies and TV 
shows will require "a large market of people" ordering movies so those in 
Hollywood can see they can make money from Intertainer and services like it. 
"It's an evolutionary process," he says. 
--- 
Mr. Peers is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau.



Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

Entertainment + Technology (A Special Report)
Overview --- Thumbs Up: What makes a good entertainment site click?
By Bruce Orwall

03/26/2001
The Wall Street Journal
R6
(Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

You are forgiven for wondering whether the Web entertainment revolution has 
ended before it even began. 
A legion of online companies that once seemed to herald the dawn of a new era 
in entertainment has instead crashed and burned during the past year, echoing 
the cruel fate of Internet companies generally. It didn't matter whether the 
venture was a scrappy start-up or one backed by marquee entertainment moguls 
-- it seemed as if every attempt to convert the Web into the next big medium 
for movies, television shows, music or original Internet creations was doomed 
to failure.
But amid the devastation, pink slips and worthless stock options, a simple 
truth may be getting lost: Some of this stuff actually works. And it's going 
to get better. 
There may not yet be business models that can support today's Web 
entertainment experiments. But that's not stopping consumers from using their 
computers to listen to music, watch movie previews, buy concert and movie 
tickets and gather information about even the most obscure rock bands, films 
and books. 
And the offerings are only going to improve as broadband access increases -- 
and the entertainment industry digests the lessons from last year's shakeout. 
Many companies are abandoning murky plans to create content specifically for 
the Web and instead are focusing on what does seem to work online. For 
instance, using the Internet to build fan hype for a movie. Or delivering the 
fabled "movies on demand" via phone or cable lines. Or coming up with ways to 
charge people for music downloads. 
"For consumers who have broadband," says Rob Glaser, chairman and chief 
executive of RealNetworks Inc., which makes online video software, "this will 
be the first year that you can buy [online entertainment] that is comparable 
to what you can get in the video store . . . . This will be a year when 
people will say, `Hey, I get this.'" 
In some sense, the potential of online entertainment has been obscured by 
both the failure and the legal entanglements of the past year. The music 
world stands as a striking example. A year ago, the now-notorious service 
called Napster was just coming on the nation's radar, providing the first 
glimpse of how a new concept called "file sharing" could allow computer users 
all over the world to swap music files in the MP3 format. Of course, almost 
none of those songs were being shared with any regard for the rights of the 
copyright holders, causing an outcry from major record labels and some 
artists that was more deafening than a Korn record. The labels prevailed in 
an epic court battle that now threatens Napster's very existence. 
Yet even as Napster struggles to get back on its feet, it has already proved 
a big point: A lot of people are really interested in downloading music. They 
can burn those MP3 files onto their own homemade customized CDs on which the 
music can be arranged as they prefer. Though teenagers have used Napster's 
file-sharing capability to fill up their hard drives with the latest hot 
singles by Jennifer Lopez or Eminem, so far it's hard to say conclusively 
that it has stopped them from buying those artists' CDs. 
In any case, the labels realize that there's no turning back now, which is 
why Bertelsmann AG's BMG unit entered into a partnership with Napster meant 
to legitimize the service and bring it into the mainstream. Even the major 
labels -- which have sneered at the notion of getting into business with 
their nemesis -- are slogging through the tortuous technical and legal 
problems that would allow them to launch their own digital downloading 
services. When they're not busy suing Web upstarts like Napster or MP3.com, 
media industry leaders like Vivendi Universal SA Chief Executive Jean-Marie 
Messier publicly predict that, someday soon, we'll all be downloading Shania 
Twain songs straight from the Web to our wireless mobile phones, which will 
also store and play the music back. 
Consumers seem ready for this kind of flexibility. They're experimenting with 
other forms of online music, such as Web-based radio stations that offer a 
much wider variety of music than most over-the-air commercial stations. Not 
to be left out, traditional broadcasters are scrambling to put their stations 
or radio networks on the Web, too -- often with appealing results, like the 
extensive archive of news programs maintained by National Public Radio. 
Web fan frenzies are by no means limited to the music world. Fans of popular 
movie franchises like "Star Wars" have taken matters into their own hands, 
creating detailed and frequently innovative shrines to their favorite icons. 
As chronicled elsewhere in this issue, sites like TheForce.net have shown 
that a loyal audience can be built around Web sites that feed fan obsessions. 
This has not escaped the notice of the movie studios. After the addicting Web 
site for "The Blair Witch Project" helped turn that film into a phenomenon 
two years ago, the movie business struggled in its efforts to use the 
Internet as a tool for creating excitement about a film. But lately, 
Hollywood has been showing signs of getting its act together. 
Now some studios have begun to do essentially what movie fans have been doing 
for a while -- creating rich, immersive Web sites built around some 
high-profile properties, aimed at stoking interest among existing fans while 
also attracting newcomers. The best recent example of this is the Web site 
for New Line Cinema's coming "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which aims to keep 
users coming by promising that new interviews, pictures or bits of 
information will be introduced almost daily for the next three years. 
The idea is to make the site addictive to potential movie audiences, in the 
same way that "Rings" author J.R.R. Tolkien sucked teenagers into the fantasy 
world of his novels. Hollywood is trying to create the same kind of 
experience for unknown properties as well, sometimes starting months before a 
film's release. "Tomcats," the first film from former Disney Studio chief Joe 
Roth's new Revolution Studios, has had a robust Web presence for months, even 
using its site to cast a couple of bit roles in the film and follow the 
exploits of the wannabes who won them. The teen comedy's imminent release 
means that the industry will soon get a good notion of whether it's worth the 
trouble to spend so much time and effort planting a movie into teenagers' 
consciousness before it opens. 
The studios now habitually show their preview trailers online -- and because 
the software that allows video to play on your computer is getting better, 
the picture and sound are more compelling all the time. The limitations of 
current technology are still frustrating, as the picture that people see when 
they play a video clip on their computer is still not even big enough to fill 
up half a computer screen. But, especially for those with broadband 
connections, the clips now play more smoothly and with fewer interruptions. 
Part of the reason the studios are exploring the Web's possibilities as a 
promotional tool is that the medium has flopped as a venue for original 
content. A big lesson of the past year has been that it's difficult for 
original Web entertainment to exist without the additional financial 
advantage of being distributed in other media as well, so that it can 
generate other revenue for its creators. 
"Of the things you saw with [failed online-entertainment firms] is that it's 
difficult to find a business model where you create original content for the 
Web," says Walt Disney Co. strategic planning chief Peter Murphy. "But using 
the Web as an ancillary form of distribution can be very powerful . . . . 
It's a wonderful form of direct delivery to the consumer." 
Indeed, the shakeout in Web technology companies has already weeded out many 
of the ambitious upstarts that wanted to air original animation or short 
live-action films on the Web. And Hollywood was atwitter last summer when 
Pop.com -- the high-profile venture formed jointly by DreamWorks SKG and 
Imagine Entertainment -- failed to even launch its much-ballyhooed site. 
Pop's backers went into the Web venture thinking that short-form 
entertainment created by DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg, Imagine's Ron Howard 
and others would draw a big audience and provide a forum for top Hollywood 
talent to devise new characters, which could then be spun into TV shows or 
movies. But after a year of frustrating attempts to devise a business model 
that would support such a venture, the Pop gang threw in the towel, promising 
to return when the medium matured. 
But some sites that show original films, like Ifilm Corp.'s Ifilm.com, have 
survived; and, in some cases, companies have decided to improve their chances 
by merging, as when Atom Corp. and its AtomFilm.com site were sold to 
Macromedia Inc.'s Shockwave.com to form the new company that, in theory, is 
better suited to keeping up with future competition. The start-ups that have 
stayed alive have frequently been smart enough to make sure they are not 
dependent solely on revenue from the Web; Atom, for example, licenses its 
short films to airlines and local TV stations, too. 
Whether they make it over the long haul remains to be seen. In fact, there is 
still a good chance that all of the efforts to date to make filmed 
entertainment work on the Web amount to little more than road kill on the 
path to the day when the major entertainment companies get their act together 
and figure out how to deliver their valuable movie and TV properties via the 
new medium. 
Several ventures are being prepared quite aggressively by the big media 
companies, aimed at readying the Internet as a platform for digitally 
delivering films to people's homes, either via phone or cable lines or by 
wireless means. One is headed by Sony Corp., which has already conducted some 
consumer tests involving films downloaded from the Web. Another effort, led 
by Walt Disney in partnership with News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, aims to do 
the same thing via Disney's Movies.com site. Disney is also weighing whether 
to move ahead with another project, dubbed MovieBox, that would also deliver 
movies on demand, but this time via a wireless technology that doesn't 
require the user to have a broadband Internet connection. Disney hasn't yet 
decided whether to proceed. 
A Los Angeles company called Intertainer Inc. has plans to deliver music and 
movies on the Web, too. But Viacom Inc.'s Blockbuster unit and Enron Corp. 
recently dissolved a highly touted joint venture, though both companies say 
they will pursue video-on-demand on their own. 
Disney's Internet efforts in general demonstrate both the promise and the 
frustration of getting a foothold in the new medium. The company's attempt to 
compete in the portal business, called Go.com, was a fiasco from the moment 
it made its debut in 1999. Already too far behind Yahoo! Inc. and others in 
the portal race, Disney attempted to narrow Go's focus to entertainment, 
recreation and leisure. That, too, was a bust, and Disney recently folded Go 
altogether, marking the embarrassing conclusion of a saga that probably 
should have never begun. 
Yet Go.com's failure has masked progress within Disney's Web unit, like its 
ESPN.com operation, which only stands to get better with the rise of 
broadband and its enhanced ability to use video and audio clips. ESPN.com, 
for example, will soon unveil a product called MySportsCenter, based on the 
ESPN cable channel's popular news program "SportsCenter." MySportsCenter will 
allow ESPN to deliver an online package of the day's sports highlights 
tailored to each user's interests and favorite teams. If you tell ESPN.com 
that your world revolves around pro hoops star Allen Iverson or baseball's 
Alex Rodriguez, the site plans to give you a package of clips based on how 
those stars and their teams did in the previous day's games. 
--- 
Mr. Orwall, a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Los Angeles bureau, 
served as contributing editor of this report. 
--- 
Journal Link: How has the Web changed the way you use and shop for 
entertainment? Join a discussion in the online Journal at 
WSJ.com/JournalLinks. 
--- Digital Entertainment Network:
Online "network" with episodic shows

Pop.com:
Animated and live-action entertainment shorts

Icebox.com:
Web animation studio

Z.com:
Short films and animations

Go.com:
Disney's Web portal

Checkout.com:
Online music e-tailer

Stan Lee Media:
Digital entertainment studio

Scour.com:
Music file-sharing service



Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 



Report on Business: The Wall Street Journal
What's News
United States
Wall Street Journal

03/26/2001
The Globe and Mail
Metro
B8
"All material Copyright (c) Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its 
licensors. All rights reserved."

Enron Corp.'s $2-billion (U.S.) agreement to sell its Portland General 
Electric unit to Sierra Pacific Resources may be the latest casualty of 
Western U.S. energy crisis. There is only a "5-per-cent probability" that the 
sale will proceed, Enron's chief executive officer, Jeffrey Skilling, said. 
Sierra Pacific has been unable to sell its interest in certain generating 
assets, which it needed to do to complete the purchase from the Houston-based 
energy and trading company. Mr. Skilling said he's "not in a particular rush" 
to sell Portland General, which Enron acquired in 1996, although he said he 
would like to put the money to work in higher-profit businesses. In Friday 
New York Stock Exchange composite trading, Enron rose $4.38 to $59.40.

Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 


USA: Enron's deal to sell Portland General seen dead-WSJ.

03/26/2001
Reuters English News Service
(C) Reuters Limited 2001.

NEW YORK, March 26 (Reuters) - Enron Corp.'s $2 billion agreement to sell its 
Portland General Electric unit to Sierra Pacific Resources may fall through, 
the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition Monday. 
There is only a "5 percent probability" that the sale will go through, Enron
's chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, was reported as saying on Friday.
Sierra Pacific has been unable to sell its interest in certain generating 
assets, which it needed to do to complete the purchase from the Houston-based 
energy and trading company, the paper said. 
Sierra Pacific agreed in November 1999 to buy Portland General for $2 billion 
and the assumption of $1 billion of debt, the paper noted. 
Enron shares finished up $4.31 at $59.40 on the New York Stock Exchange 
Friday. The stock has a 52-week high of $90.56 and a 52-week low of $51.55. 
Sierra Pacific shares, meanwhile, finished up 4 cents at $12.80, also on the 
Big Board. Sierra Pacific stock has a 52-week high of $19.44 and a 52-week 
low of $10.57.

Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 


Enron's 2 bln usd sale of PGE unit unlikely to go through - CEO

03/26/2001
AFX News
(c) 2001 by AFP-Extel News Ltd

LONDON (AFX) - Enron Corp's 2 bln usd sale of Portland General Electric unit 
to Sierra Pacific Resources is unlikely to go through, Enron chief executive 
Jeffrey Skilling said according to the Wall Street Journal. 
Sierra Pacific has been unable to sell its interest in certain generating 
assets, which it needed to do to complete the purchase from the Houston-based 
energy and trading company, the newspaper said.
Skilling said he's "not in a particular rush" to sell Portland General, 
although he said he would like to put the money to work in higher-profit 
businesses. 
There are "several billion dollars worth of assets" that Enron will sell "in 
the next few years" in its quest to maximize its returns, he said. 
Skilling said Enron is moving more heavily into the trading of liquefied 
natural gas and is considering exercising options to acquire three LNG 
vessels as well as to develop LNG gasification facilities in the Bahamas and 
Venezuela. He said Enron Online, the firm's Internet-based trading platform, 
soon will begin trading LNG contracts, as well. 
Skilling also said the company plans to cut capital spending on its 
fiber-optics network to about 250 mln usd this year from an earlier estimated 
budget of 750 mln. He said the company can acquire much of the 
telecommunications capacity it needs to expand its businesses through 
contracts with other owners rather than by building additional network 
capacity itself. 
Despite the fact California's utilities aren't paying their bills, Enron's 
credit exposure in that state is declining, he added. 
vh/jfr For more information and to contact AFX: www.afxnews.com and 
www.afxpress.com

Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

INDIA'S ESSAR MAY OPT OUT OF SHELL LNG VENTURE

03/26/2001
Asia Pulse
(c) Copyright 2001 Asia Pulse PTE Ltd.

NEW DELHI, March 26 Asia Pulse - The Essar Group is considering pulling out 
of the Royal Dutch Shell promoted Rs 23 billion (US$493.7 million) Hazira 
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Terminal project in the western state of Gujarat 
due to "overcrowding" of gas projects on the western coast. 
"We are having a rethink on the venture as the region may not be able to 
absorb the amount of gas coming by way of proposed projects," Essar Group 
Chairman Shashi Ruia told PTI.
Essar, being the possible buyer of LNG for its 515 MW power plant at Hazira, 
has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Shell India for equity 
participation in the project. 
Besides, the five million tonnes Essar-Shell LNG terminal, LNG import 
facilities of more than 12.5 million tonnes by various consortias are being 
put up in Gujarat, Ruia said adding Gujarat and up-North won't be able to 
absorb such an inflow of natural gas. 
While Petronet LNG, a joint venture of Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Bharat 
Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL), Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL) and Oil 
and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) is setting up a five million tonne import 
facility at Dahej, British Gas is putting up 2.5 million tonnes LNG terminal 
at Pipavav. 
Reliance is also setting up a five million tonnes LNG terminal at Jamnagar at 
an estimated cost of Rs 45 billion. 
Ruia said two projects in Maharashtra - five million tonnes capacity LNG 
terminal of Enron and 3.5 million tonnes import facility of GAIL-TotalFinaElf 
at Trombay - would saturate the demand in the region. 
(PTI) 26-03 1756

Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.